


Mob Rule

by spaceylacey83



Category: The Flash (Comics), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Action, Adaptation, Canon Compliant, F/M, Fluff, I really relate to Cisco, Kidnapping, Minor Character Death, Mob Rule, New 52, Non-Graphic Violence, Suspense, Torture, haha yeah, just to be clear, references, so many, some of the kidnapping is though, squishy science, the torture is not happening to any of Team Flash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2017-01-20
Packaged: 2018-09-09 03:41:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 31,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8874373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spaceylacey83/pseuds/spaceylacey83
Summary: When Barry's college roommate turns up dead, it kickstarts a mystery that Barry really wishes would have waited until after this whole Alchemy fiasco was over.  An adaptation of the New 52 story 'Mob Rule'  by Brian Buccellato, rewritten to fit into season three between episodes 3x05 and 3x06.  Canon compliant.





	1. Old Friends and New Science

**Author's Note:**

> Hello!
> 
> So, my goal with this story was to write something that could feel like it really seamlessly fit into the canon. Like this is what we didn't get to see happening between episodes five and six. I won't be pushing any of the season's major plots forward in this fic, I'm going to let the show do that, and while there is definitely some fluffy Iris/Barry love here, the shipping is more like the whipped cream than the actual body of the sundae. So, here we are. Julian and Barry have just been out for drinks, Barry lives in Cisco's apartment, Caitlin has just been to see her mother, and Iris is, in general, fabulous and dating Barry. I hope you like it and that, if you do, you'll let me know.
> 
> All characters belong to DC and WB.

It hasn’t been a bad morning. The line at Jitters had been short. Barry had dragged himself out of bed at the first sound of his alarm even though he and Cisco had stayed up late into the night watching arguably shitty Star Trek cartoons on Netflix. He’s actually a little bit early. It might even qualify as a good morning.

Unfortunately, the look on Joe’s face as he waits for Barry on the edge of the crime scene promises that it’s not going to stay one.

“Bear, hold up,” Joe says, stopping Barry before he can approach the covered body. His expression is grave but sympathetic and this must be _bad_. 

“What’s going on,” Barry prods, when Joe seems to stall out. 

Joe hesitates a moment longer. “It’s Manuel Lago.”

Barry’s breath leaves him in one great gasp and he pushes past Joe toward the body covered in the alley. He drops his gear and falls to his knees, rips back the cover and - sure enough - beneath it is someone Barry had never expected to see again. 

“I know you two were… friends,” Joe says and Barry looks up at his foster father’s grief stricken expression with one of his own.

“Yeah,” he says, looking back down at the familiar face.

Even though Barry sits there for a good ten minutes before he begins to work, no one bothers him. Joe’s doing, he assumes, and he’s grateful for it as he wipes at his eyes, hot with unshed tears. 

The crime scene doesn’t offer much. Manny has been dead less than five hours at Barry’s best guess but the only footprints fresh enough to match up are Manny’s own. He hasn’t been shot or stabbed or strangled or hit hard enough to bruise. There are no overt signs of drugs or drink.

“What happened to you,” Barry asks the corpse who, of course, doesn’t answer.

***

Crime scene evidence doesn’t really offer any answers, either. Manny has spent some time in the Badlands recently, judging by the grit dug into the soles of his shoes, but that’s just a thing people who are never Barry do. Reddish hairs found stuck through the weave of his shirt turn out to be from a cocker spaniel and the black ones are from Manny himself, just like all the rest of the DNA Barry can lift from his clothing. From what Barry can tell, he’d been sober as a priest and entirely alone.

“Fffuuuuu-.”

“Afternoon, Allen,” Julian chirps from behind his desk and Barry starts so badly that his chair actually rolls back a few inches.

“Jesus, Julian,” Barry gasps and Julian’s barely there smirk takes a turn for the chagrined.

“I heard about your friend. My condolences.”

Barry nods, still clutching his chest. “I didn’t hear you come in,” he explains. “I was totally zoned out.”

“Sorry, mate,” Julian says.

“S’fine,” Barry answers, waving the apology off. “I’m just not getting anything useful and I’m frustrated.”

“Want a second pair of eyes?”

While they aren’t necessarily best buddies, Barry has been making a concentrated effort not to be a dick for no reason and Julian seems to be toeing the same line. Barry’s not sure what Julian can find that he hasn’t but he waves at his collection of samples and rumpled clothing all the same.

“I’d appreciate that, man.”

Who knows? Maybe he will find something Barry’s missed.

***

Julian is still working when Iris brings lunch. Barry is focused on an entirely different case, some warehouse robbery that seems to have been pulled off by a small army, and it isn’t until Iris actually reaches out to touch his shoulder that Barry is pulled out of his own head, giving another jerky start. 

“Whoa,” he says, with a breathless laugh, more embarrassment than humor. “Hi, Iris.” He glances at Julian, thinking of his promise to keep visitors out of the lab or, at least, to keep their visits short, but his co-worker just looks mildly amused. 

“Did the same thing to me when I got here,” Julian tells Iris, shaking his head at Barry.

“You ok, Bear,” Iris wants to know, a sympathetic smile on her face, and Barry nods.

“Just focused,” he says. “Just... focusing on this warehouse robbery cause we’re not getting anything from Manny, right now.”

“I’m really sorry, Barry,” she says and her pretty brown eyes look so sad that Barry feels tears of his own wanting to fall again. When she hugs him, he practically falls into it but Iris is the same steady warmth she’s always been and not even Julian complains as she holds him, giving him time to compose himself.

“Come on,” she says, kissing his temple. “Let’s go eat. It’s gorgeous outside.”

They find seats on a wooden bench within view of the police station and Iris lets Barry puzzle over the warehouse robbery rather than pushing about Manny. He’s grateful for it, for the kind of understanding that only comes with years of really knowing someone and so he takes the opportunity to not think of Manny at all.

Or, well. Not much.

“I told Scott I needed to skip the gala tonight,” Iris finally says during a lull in the conversation and Barry must have had a look on his face because Iris has a look on _her_ face and he doesn’t even have to ask what she’s thinking.

“What, no… You’ve been talking about this for a month. You bought a dress. It’s a story that’s not about the Flash…”

“My boyfriend - my _best friend_ \- got some pretty awful news today,” Iris points out. “I wanted to be there for him.”

Barry can’t help a tiny smile - god, he loves this woman - but he shakes his head. “Please. Don’t skip out on something you’ve been looking forward to for this. I’m cool. I have a weird roommate with a foosball table and everything.”

“Well, then I can go to the symposium tomorrow,” she offers and this time Barry actually laughs. Iris is as interested in the Stagg Industries Symposium as Barry is in the charity gala she’s attending tonight and they both know it.

“You literally hugged me when I said I wasn’t expecting you to go.”

“Still…”

“How about this: _after_ the symposium, we grab dinner and go eat it somewhere awesome like Mt. Rushmore or something. We can sit on one of their heads.”

It’s Iris’s turn to laugh. “Deal,” she says, smiling, and Barry smiles back.

***

“Toxicology came back clean,” Barry says later, closed into Singh’s office with Joe and the Captain. “Honestly, everything came back clean. There’s no indication that anyone else was in that alley near the time of death and the coroner’s report says there’s no apparent injury, inside or out. He wasn’t sick with anything they could identify. His heart was almost unnaturally healthy, minus the part where it’s not beating anymore. To quote the coroner, Manny just, ‘expired.’”

“Manny,” Singh repeats. “You two were roommates, weren’t you? He ever contact you after he left for the CIA?”

Barry just shakes his head. “It’s been at least four years since I’ve heard from him.”

Singh doesn’t look all that pleased by his answer. “He was deep cover. Classified to hell and back. I can’t find anything on what he might have been up to.” When all Barry can do is shrug helplessly, Singh sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. “He still got any family?”

“Just his mom. Malaya Lago. She lives in Keystone City last I heard.”

Singh nods and takes a seat at his desk. “Well, let me know if you find anything, Allen. I wouldn’t get too attached, though. Feds are going to be here soon enough, I’d bet money. Lago has spec ops all over him. Too deeply classified for them to really let us nose into things.”

He isn’t wrong. Not two hours later Barry and Julian sit at their desks and watch as men in suits take the hard copies of all of his files on Manny Lago, as well as all of the useless forensic evidence that had been collected at the scene. He even has to roll out of the way while one of the agents roots through his computer, transferring the relevant files to a flash drive before deleting any trace of the investigation from Barry’s hard drive. Barry doesn’t offer his seat.

***

“CIA agents are just dicks,” he announces, when he slouches into the cortex after work in full rant mode. Cisco is alone, eating Sunchips despite Caitlin’s rule against eating anything in the lab that has the potential to crumb, and he spins around in his chair when Barry speaks. “Bossing me around like I work for them and taking stuff and-.” 

“Why was the CIA taking your stuff,” Cisco interrupts, and Barry stops, heaves a sigh and tries to calm himself down.

“We found one of their deep cover agents dead in an alley.”

“Yup,” Cisco says, nodding. “That’ll do it.”

“Where’s Caitlin,” Barry finds himself asking a lot more often than usual, lately. None of them really have enforced schedules so much as they have a pattern of coming together here and Caitlin has broken hers enough recently to be noticeable.

“She said she has a cold. But we’re talking about dead CIA agents in Central City. Is it weird? Like, our kind of weird?”

Barry shrugs. “I don’t know if it’s our kind of weird but it’s definitely weird.” He takes Caitlin’s usual seat and accepts a chip when Cisco offers it. “No apparent cause of death for one thing. For another I, uh… I knew him.”

“Oh man, I’m sorry to hear that. Were you guys close? Do you need to just go?”

“I’m fine,” Barry answers and then, because he worries he sounds cold, adds, “It’s been a long time since we’ve even spoken to each other. We didn’t necessarily part on the best of terms, honestly. I’m sad he’s dead - I’m not saying that I’m not - I just… I’m ok.” He realizes that he is looking down at his hands and so makes a point of looking back up, meeting Cisco’s eyes. Only, when he does, Cisco has this soft, understanding look about him and something about it hits Barry just right and, before he knows it, he’s spilling his guts. “His dad was killed in the World Trade Center attack in 2001. It might sound weird but we kinda… bonded over it. I was going to school because I wanted to work in forensics and get my dad out of jail and Manny was going to school because he needed a 3.0 grade average and a bachelor’s degree to even try to join the CIA. He was kind of… obsessed with terrorists because of what had happened to his father. We shared an apartment for five years.”

“Wow, so not just a casual acquaintance,” Cisco says when Barry trails off. He offers up another chip, which Barry takes.

“Yeah. He uh… We worked together for a while. He was at CCPD for three years trying to meet more of his CIA requisites… Like I said he was obsessed with terrorism and that translated into this anti-Muslim thing and he was just so… black and white about it. We ended up getting into this huge fight… I told him that, with his attitude, he was exactly the wrong kind of person for the job he wanted. I haven’t seen him since. Joe had to help me with rent that month, he just bailed.” The more Barry talks, the more the reality of the situation sets in. He lets out a sigh that shudders more than he wants it to and rubs his eyes, stinging again with tears that have tried to fall all day. “He wasn’t a bad guy. He just… he had this hurt that took him in the wrong direction and wouldn’t let him be objective.”

“I know people like that,” Cisco says because of course he does, as a Latino living in America in 2016. “Good people with bad ideas. Totally likeable until you get them on one of their firestarter topics. So you guys were friends who never got to hash out your differences and now he’s gone.” He doesn’t mention his brother but hearing it put that way certainly makes Barry think of him. He nods. Cisco offers him another chip and he takes it, crunching morosely. 

“Sorry, man. That really does suck,” Cisco says. A brief moment passes in silence. “So… would this be a good night or a bad night to watch more Star Trek: The Animated Series?”

Barry huffs a laugh and rubs at his eyes again. “Good night. Definitely.”

***

“Oh my god,” Barry says when Cisco comes out of his bedroom in his brand new Flash pajamas and Cisco grins like Barry’s nearly mortified expression is exactly what he’d been going for. 

“Shut up,” he says, cheerful. “You can pretend you don’t love having pajamas made and worn in your honor but I don’t buy it. As a member of Team Flash, I reserve the right to fly my colors.”

“That’s so weird,” Barry groans.

“And awesome.”

“And _weird_ ,” Barry insists but he’s laughing by now. Cisco’s way too good at this. Pulling him out of his own head with a laugh, ready to listen to anything Barry needs to say. Of all the things he’s tried to, ‘fix,’ since mangling the timeline, his relationship with Cisco feels like one of the most valuable. Even if it means sitting through mildly enjoyable, thoroughly forgettable cartoon sci-fi animated in a style that looked dated before Barry and Cisco were even born. It’s all right, though. Barry likes Star Trek and he likes Cisco and, especially after the events of the day, it’s nice to lounge on Cisco’s couch in Cisco’s surprisingly awesome apartment, eating takeout while they laugh at awkward dialogue and stilted animation.

They do end up skipping the one where the Enterprise’s crew - through irresponsible use of time travel - erases Spock from the timeline. Cisco sums it up with a, “The important trivia is that Spock taught himself the nerve pinch,” and clicks to the next episode.

“Hey,” Barry says, later, once the credits are rolling again and the silence doesn’t feel awkward anymore. “Stagg Industries Symposium tomorrow. You said you were going, right?”

Cisco, busy picking baby corn from a takeout carton, looks up to fix Barry with an expression that clearly says, ‘duh.’

“I was gonna go too. If you wanna wait until I get back from work, we could go together.”

Cisco considers this. “I can get down with that. But we’re taking my car.” 

***

The Stagg Industries Symposium is massive, drawing attendees from all over the country. Traffic near Stagg Industries is bad enough that Barry doesn’t even have to bring up the relative merits of superspeed travel because Cisco does it himself. 

“I’d almost rather have the nausea that comes from being dragged around at mach speeds,” he admits, frowning at the long line of tail lights in front of them. Barry smirks at his profile but doesn’t rub it in.

The crowd inside the building is big and enthusiastic and it warms Barry’s heart to see all the open appreciation for STEM applications. As Cisco had informed him when they sat down together to watch the latest Avengers movie, it really is the golden age of the nerd.

“Caitlin would die, look at this,” Cisco says, stopping in front of a display bearing a small, hexagonal object. Nearby, a thirty-something man in a lab coat informs them that what they are looking at is a portable genetic re-coder.

“I didn’t realize we had… non-portable genetic re-coders,” Barry says.

“Bro. We have one at S.T.A.R. Labs. It takes up a whole room, though.”

“Oh. Caitlin’s?”

“Caitlin’s,” Cisco affirms.

“S.T.A.R. Labs, you say,” says the man in the lab coat, drawing their attention away from the tiny technological miracle. When Cisco nods, the man shakes both of their hands. “Dr. Darwin Elias. I wasn’t aware there was still much work going on over there.”

Barry can practically feel Cisco bristling.

“Oh, you know,” Cisco says, not bothering to hide his frown. “Just us screw ups over at S.T.A.R. Labs.”

“Oh,” Elias says and Barry is marginally gratified to see that his expression is stricken. “I wasn’t trying to be rude. I suffer, you see, from chronic foot in mouth disease. I was actually very impressed by the metahuman countermeasures S.T.A.R. Labs provided the police last year. It’s just been some time since we heard of anything going on over there.”

“We’re kind of used to hearing what a trash heap S.T.A.R. is,” Barry explains, if only because he, too, suffers from chronic foot in mouth disease.

“The court of public opinion,” Elias says, calmly understanding. “It’s sterner than a court of law, really.”

“He’s like a Professor Stein who hasn’t actually lived long enough to earn all that pretension,” Cisco says when they leave Dr. Elias and his portable gene re-coder behind and it makes Barry laugh loud enough to draw the aforementioned doctor’s notice.

***

Dr. Darwin Elias aside, the symposium is awesome. There’s a machine that turns their brainwaves into visuals that can be played back on a screen and they waste a little time visualizing each other in ridiculous settings and situations. Barry loses it when a grainy image of him riding Serendipity the Pink Dragon appears on the screen.

“This is my new favorite thing,” Cisco informs Barry once he’s calmed down. “This says they did fMRI scans on people while they watched movies and stuff. God, it must’ve taken thousands of man hours.”

It is pretty rad. So is the racing game with tiny red cars that they can control with their thoughts. The placard says that the game is used to help people with cognitive issues but Cisco and Barry spend most of their time driving off cliffs or crashing into trees and getting into trouble for swearing. Cisco gets the hang of it quicker than Barry does but they leave the game alone after their third scolding.

“I think my brain works too fast now,” Barry says in his own defense. Cisco snorts, gives him a dry grin, and Barry can’t help but laugh at himself, too. “No seriously, trying to control that car was like trying to use a mouse with the sensitivity way up.”

“Keep telling yourself that, buddy.”

That’s not even close to all of it. They watch an onstage demonstration where a paraplegic man walks a good ten feet across the stage using nothing but a walker, a cap full of electrodes, and a pair of leg braces. They play with surprisingly high quality microscopes, printed right in front of them from a system that schools may one day use to provide their students equipment that would otherwise cost out the nose. As the event progresses, Barry feels a steadily growing sense of awe at the brilliance and sheer goodwill on display and he’s so entirely impressed by the ingenuity of human beings that the thrill of it is visceral and real.

“You know, this isn’t really Iris’s scene but I probably should’ve taken her up on her offer to come,” Barry says when they’ve stopped to get sodas from a clerk behind a table covered in white linen. “I can think of like, five articles here off the top of my head and I’m not even a journalist.”

“How is this not anybody’s scene,” Cisco wants to know, reading a pamphlet for what appears to be a hypospray. He waves it at Barry. “She could totally point out how this is obviously Star Trek inspired and make a clickbaity title to lure in Star Trek fans.”

“Eh,” Barry answers, ready with a rant about clickbait that Cisco’s probably already heard, but before he can say much more, the bustle of the symposium is interrupted by an ear-splitting shattering of glass. Barry whirls around in time to see what looks like a dozen masked men pouring into the building through what used to be a plate glass window. He hears several peculiar thunking sounds and then has to jump back as something small and green and oblong lands near his feet.

“Oh crap,” Cisco says, the words barely making it out before the canister begins to spew some acrid aerosol that makes Barry’s eyes sting and his throat want to close.

Thanks to the very same quick firing neurons that had made the racing game difficult, Barry processes the situation in a millisecond and has zipped himself and Cisco out into the alley behind Stagg Industries before another has time to pass. By the time two full seconds have passed, Barry is in his suit and Cisco is sagging against the brick wall. 

“Ok, so maybe it’s better Iris isn’t here,” Cisco wheezes.

“I have to-,” Barry starts but Cisco waves at him and nods, his eyes red and streaming.

“Go,” he manages and Barry hurries back into the building.

The gas inside Stagg industries is a thick, choking fog through which Barry can barely make out what’s going on. The people he can see are all in various stages of losing consciousness and he knows there’s well over a hundred people in the lobby alone. Taking them out one by one to the alley where he’d left Cisco seems less efficient than simply removing the gas so he does that, taking position outside the broken windows and rotating his arms until the vortex created begins to suck the gas out into the open air where it can dissipate.

A rapid casing of the ground floor determines a few things for him. First, everyone seems to be alive and many are even conscious. Second, Dr. Elias’ portable gene re-coder is no longer on its display. Third, the people responsible can only be in the elevator which has just reached the top top floor. Through the broken windows, he can hear the staccato roar of a nearby helicopter and Barry spares a thought for the absolute precision on display here before speeding back outside and up the Stagg building’s smooth glass exterior.

He finally gets a good look at the attackers on the roof where they are loading into the helicopter Barry had heard. Dressed in identical black armor, with identical black masks, Barry’s first thought is that it’s Multiplex again and it even makes sense because they seem to all be built the same and didn’t that guy work here anyway?

Unfortunately, Danton Black is dead. Fell to his death on the street outside this very same building. Which wipes that theory out.

“Hey!” His shout catches the attention of the group just barely too late. The only one still left on the roof stops to give Barry a jaunty wave then leaps from the edge of the building to catch hold of the climbing net hanging from the open hatch of the helicopter. “Oh no you don’t,” Barry mutters.

He puts on a burst of speed that propels him off that same ledge and, before the helicopter can get very far at all, Barry is hanging off the man hanging off the climbing net.

“Hey, there,” Barry calls when the man begins to struggle. “Should’ve just run, guy. I mean, I’d have probably still-.”

Barry forgets what he’s talking about when the man he’s holding onto just lets go. Half a mile above Central City, he lets go and suddenly they are plummeting through the air together, Barry’s arms still caught in a death grip around the other man’s waist.

Barry’s brain works really quickly these days. He can take in a library’s worth of information in mere minutes or formulate a plan of attack before his opponents can take their first breath. Sometimes, like now when he’s falling toward what might potentially be his death, he manages to think the word, ‘fuck,’ a truly staggering number of times in a row.

His partner in this fall is limp as a ragdoll and the ground is approaching fast so Barry does the only thing he can think of and tries to vibrate himself and his companion fast enough that they will phase through the asphalt instead of breaking themselves on it.

It works which is, honestly, a bit of a mixed blessing as they land instead in the sewer beneath the asphalt. The surface of the shallow water there isn’t soft by any means but it’s softer than the roadway would’ve been and so Barry, with whatever protection has allowed him to survive mach speed impacts with solid walls, finds himself lying in sewer water beneath an unconscious mercenary with more broken bones than he cares to count but also alive enough to count them if he were so inclined.

Above him, the cement ceiling of the sewer tunnel has an odd web of glowing fissures spreading into a roughly circular shape. Barry stares at it from over the other man’s shoulder, willing his brain to understand what it means. He doesn’t feel quite as quick as he had one sewer floor impact ago, though, and instead of figuring out anything helpful, Barry just stares as the concrete begins to hum and blur. The explosion leaves his ears ringing and he hides his face against the unconscious man’s shoulder as a shower of rubble falls from what is now a gaping hole in the street.

“For real,” Barry says to no one.

Distantly, he registers the sound of running feet and then Cisco’s there, looking down at Barry with a shocked expression Barry is sure he’d laugh at if he weren’t trapped beneath a six foot plus bear of a man with at least two broken ribs.

“B- Flash!” Cisco says, frantically, and he drops down into the hole with a splash of fetid water.

“I caught him,” Barry slurs in answer.

Cisco helps Barry roll the unconscious man off of him and Barry draws in a shaky breath, grimacing as the effort spikes through him with a hot flare of pain.

“You blew up the road,” Cisco blurts after he’s taken a moment to check Barry over. 

“Sorry.”

“ _How_ did you blow up the road?”

“I will think about that and let you know,” Barry answers, voice a little thicker than normal.

“You are messed up, dude,” Cisco says, voice trembling just enough to be noticeable, and Barry watches him dig in a pocket for his phone. “I’m calling Caitlin.”

“She has a cold,” Barry reminds him. He coughs, the feeling sharp in his chest, and then lets out a miserable groan.

“She’ll get out for this… Caitlin, hey!” Barry listens drowsily while Cisco describes the situation to their friend but he’s distracted from it by the sheer weight of the exhaustion washing over him and how insanely difficult it suddenly is to breathe. He coughs again, hugging his burning ribs and, from further away than it had seemed before, he hears Cisco say, “Oh shit, Caitlin, he’s coughing up blood!”

There’s more, Cisco’s voice panicked and shrill, but Barry is well and truly passing out, now, so he manages to miss most of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the comic, Barry throws the guy falling with him through a window into a building. I always wondered why he did that and, when it came time to write it, I couldn't figure out any good ways to frame Barry's thought process. So, instead, he held on and got a little smushed. [Here](http://imgur.com/a/qK6UB)
> 
> Also, everything mentioned at the symposium is real! Minus the gene re-coders. I googled them and just found some stuff about chakras?


	2. The Thing That C(sh)ould Have Been Worse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Flash brings back Darwin Elias' portable gene re-coder and then does the coolest thing ever with a plane.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me again. I realized that I am going to be in the hospital for the next two days and then I'm going to stay with family for Christmas so, here. This week's chapter of Mob Rule a few days earlier than I'd planned to give it to you. If you know the story, you'll know that a particular line of Cisco's is _really_ true. I don't think I can get away with doing that in Arrowverse, though, and still make it back in time for 3x06 to proceed as it does. So, the first real appearance of squishy science is in this chapter.

When he wakes up in the sterile quiet of S.T.A.R. Labs, Barry feels about a thousand times better than he can last remember feeling. The lights are low and Iris is sleeping in a chair beside his bed and Barry, clearheaded after his nap of indeterminate length, feels a little guilty at the sight of the rather uncomfortable looking position she’s ended up in.

Barry shifts in the too-familiar hospital bed, unable to help a quiet mewl of discomfort, and hears the sound of heels clicking on the tile somewhere behind him.

“Hey, Barry,” Caitlin says, voice low for Iris’s sake, and approaches his bedside. “How are you feeling?”

“Ugh,” Barry answers, shifting again now that he’s made himself uncomfortable. “I would say, ‘like I fell off a building,’ but I mostly just kinda ache everywhere.”

Caitlin gives him a little half smile that doesn’t take too long to turn serious. “At least you got to sleep through the worst of it. All of your ribs were broken this time.”

“Whoa.”

“Yeah. You also had a skull fracture, a punctured lung, three fractured vertebrae, and a dislocated hip. Why exactly did you jump off of Stagg Industries again?”

“I was trying to get onto a helicopter? The guys who attacked the symposium were getting away. Got the one still trying to get in and he just let go. Hey, what happened to him? He was unconscious before we even hit the ground.”

At the mention of the mercenary that had ridden Barry down into the sewer, something in Caitlin’s expression changes. “You might want to wait and talk to Joe about that,” she says, though she has the grace to look sorry about it, at least.

“Caitlin…”

“Ok, ok.” Caitlin sighs and crosses her arms. “He was dead. I’m… not entirely sure why. Fall damage wasn’t minimal but it shouldn’t have outright killed him… You broke his fall, after all, but… That’s not the worst part.”

“Barry?” They are interrupted by Iris’ sleepy voice and Barry turns just in time to watch her sit up and really process the situation. He can tell exactly when it happens because her face lights up and she jumps up to wrap him in a hug that makes his still healing body twinge painfully. “Sorry! Sorry,” she adds when he can’t help a soft cry of discomfort. “God, Bear, you looked so bad when I got here. Are you ok?”

Barry nods. “Yeah, just sore still. Sorry I’ve got you sleeping at S.T.A.R. Labs again.”

“That’s not what you need to be sorry about,” Iris answers, her tone going a little dry. “If you’re going to apologize, how about apologizing for jumping off Stagg Industries.” She smiles a bit, softening at his chagrined expression. “I’m glad you’re ok. I know you usually are but that doesn’t make it any easier to see you hurt like that.”

“Sorry,” Barry says again.

“Stop apologizing, Barry.”

“So- All right.”

Iris laughs and leans close to kiss Barry’s forehead. “My boyfriend the superhero,” she says, and Barry, despite his general discomfort, feels a quiet thrill at the words. His grin is probably big and stupid but right now every breath he takes is full of Iris’ scent and he doesn’t think he could help it if he wanted to.

“You know,” Caitlin says, “I’m just gonna go tell Joe that you’re awake.”

Once Caitlin’s gone, Iris pulls her chair closer so that she can sit and gives Barry a tired smile. “I’m glad you’re ok,” she says again.

“I really am.”

“Nobody else would be after that, you know.”

Barry quirks his eyebrows, unsure what he’s supposed to say to a statement like that. ‘I’m not Nobody Else,’ sounds unbearably cocky and dismissive. ‘I’m fine,’ is played out. 

Luckily, the sound of quick footsteps alerts them to Joe’s imminent arrival and Barry doesn’t have to answer at all. He grips Barry’s shoulder and shakes his head, looking nothing so much as exhausted, and Barry feels another spike of guilt.

“You scare me half to death sometimes, you know that?”

“Sorry, Joe,” Barry says again.

“Next time you’re thinking of jumping off a building, how about you just don’t?”

Barry laughs, even though it hurts a little, and says, “I’ll try to keep that in mind.” Joe looks serious, though, so Barry sobers up too. “Caitlin said… She kinda acted like there was something about that guy that fell with me that I wasn’t going to like.”

Joe’s expression pretty clearly translates to, ‘that’s putting it mildly.’ “It’s Lago again.”

Barry blinks at Joe, his jaw a little slack. “... His… body?”

“No, this new body. The guy you dragged off a helicopter. It’s Lago. Unless you forgot to tell me he had an identical twin brother.”

Barry’s brain doesn’t really know what to do with this information. First, he’s ninety-nine percent sure that Manny is an only child. Second, he can’t stop his brain going to places like clones and breaches and doppelgangers and every related sci-fi film he’s ever seen. He shakes his head to clear away the mess of thoughts.

“Where’s the body?”

“CIA scooped it up a few hours ago while you were sleeping. We did find something on him that Cisco called a portable gene… decoder first, though.”

“Re-coder,” Barry corrects automatically. “Seriously? Of all the guys I could’ve grabbed, I grabbed that one?”

“Pretty lucky for someone who broke half the bones in his damn body a few seconds later,” Joe agrees, shaking his head again. “Cisco and Caitlin seem to think that the Flash should take it back to Dr. Elias, find out if he knows why Mob Rule wanted it.”

“Mob… Rule?” 

Joe rolls his eyes, adopts a long suffering look. “Cisco,” he says, by way of explanation. “The symposium isn’t their first hit, as it turns out. Remember the warehouse with all those lab supplies that were stolen? You said there was about twenty guys?” Barry nods. “Manager saw the footage of the symposium attack. Seems to think our twenty guys came from that same group. Now, Cisco’s got about a hundred other weird ideas about them but I’ll let him explain that part.” Barry smiles a bit before he can help it and Joe smiles back, shrugs his shoulders. “Get some rest, Bear. I’ll cover for you at the station but you should try to make it in as soon as you’re up to it. My excuses are wearing a little thin.” He pauses, then adds, “A lot thin.”

“Thanks, Joe,” Barry says.

He gets an affectionate hair ruffling in answer and Iris gets a kiss on the top of her head, then Joe is gone. Barry looks at Iris and Iris gives him a small smile and folds her arms on the edge of Barry’s mattress. 

“Rest,” she says, taking his hand and kissing his open palm. “I’m not mad at you. Though, if you ever jump off a building again, I actually will be. Just FYI.”

Barry laughs under his breath. “Understood.”

***

Sleep doesn’t really come, even after Iris leaves to get ready for work. Eventually, Barry gets to his feet, wincing at the dull pain in his hip and his… mostly everything, really. He can’t stop thinking about what Joe’s said, about the second dead guy in two days who is and/or is identical to his old roommate. The grief of finding the first body feels a little duller under the weight of his utter bewilderment, so he wanders in the direction of Cisco’s lab.

Cisco is working on a length of familiar red material when he gets there, absorbed enough that Barry is standing right beside him before he notices.

“Hey! You look better than last time I saw you.”

Barry shrugs and offers Cisco a half smile. “Just lucky I guess.”

“Pft,” Cisco answers.

“What are you doing?”

“New suit. The one from last night smells like shit. Literal shit. Not just, ‘oh, this stinks.’ It smells like poo.”

“Gross.”

“You don’t smell so rosy, yourself. I mean, Caitlin like… wiped you off but you’ve got something only slightly less pungent going on, right now. It’s totally the only reason I even noticed you. I thought HR farted or something.” He nods toward HR who, Barry realizes, is sitting at his computer in the rear of the room.

“It really is awful,” HR says, chuckling like he’s agreeing that the weather is nice and not that Barry smells like shit.

Barry frowns as Cisco turns back to the pile of fabric on the table and then tries to sniff himself without making it too obvious that he’s sniffing himself.

“Okay,” he says. “I guess I’m going to go get a shower. First though… Joe said you had ideas about those guys from last night?”

“I do.” Cisco puts his work down again and swivels so that his chair is facing Barry, looking almost excited. “So, first, I admit I thought, ‘Hey, it’s Multiplex all over again-.’”

“You know, I thought the same thing.”

“Right? We know there’s more than one speedster. So, then when that guy actually just died instead of being reabsorbed, it occurred to me that you had to chase them into a helicopter because they were all individual people and someone like Multiplex would’ve just… What do we call it when they’re just one person again? Like, the verb.”

“Oh! I’ve got this,” HR says. “Uh… Remerge, coalesce-?”

“So Multiplex would’ve just coalesced and hauled ass. No need to have a getaway option for more than one dude.”

“Good point…”

Cisco nods, flashes a bit of a self satisfied little smile. “So, there’s this really interesting shot from the elevator’s security camera. They’re all standing shoulder to shoulder so it’s really easy to tell that they’re the exact same height and even seem to have the same build. We’ve already found two identical dead bodies. What if the CIA cloned your friend Manny?”

Barry just stares.

His expression must be saying more than he is, though, because Cisco says, “Oh, come on. You went to another Earth and met a freaking alien with laser eyes. Cloning is something even normal people know happens! I mean… not with, like, whole humans but people are aware of it happening.”

It’s a hard point to argue with, honestly.

“That’s just so… I mean, he’s just…” Barry stalls out. Manny’s just what? Not the sort of guy Barry can imagine the CIA wanting a large supply of? He might be, though. Sure, he’d been hot headed and prickly near the end of their friendship and he’d had a grudge against a whole subset of the population, but he’d also been a terrific athlete and an impressive student. The idea just feels so completely absurd - that there could be even more Manuel Lagos running around out there right now - that Barry has to struggle to take it seriously. It’s not a new feeling, really.

“CIA, man,” Cisco says. “They have their fingers in all the weirdest pies.”

***

Barry ends up going in for work around noon, after stopping by Cisco’s apartment to shower and change. Singh gives him a bit of side eye as he heads for the stairs but, other than that, no one comments on his tardiness. 

“Late again, Allen.” Except for Julian, though the words lack most of the cool hostility Barry had grown accustomed to before their truce. 

“Sorry, man.” 

“I’m going to get you one of those electric shock watches for Christmas.”

Barry doesn’t laugh but he kind of wants to. Instead, he grins at his desk and answers, dryly, “And I will find some way to rig it to your chair.”

Julian snorts and shakes his head but he’s smirking just a bit, too, when he goes back to the paperwork he’d been doing.

It’s actually kind of cool.

The silence in the lab is comfortable in a way it hasn’t been since Flashpoint and Barry invests himself in a simple burglary, matching a set of prints to a name before starting in on the requisite paperwork.

In this way, two hours pass, quiet and uneventful. Barry does his work with half a mind on Manny Lago and his dead maybe clones while the only sound from Julian is the clack of his keyboard or the occasional scritching of a pen. 

The peace is finally broken by the ringing of Barry’s phone, loud in all the quiet of the lab. ‘Caitlin,’ the screen says, so Barry answers it, swiveling his chair so that he is facing the wall and not Julian.

“Hey, Caitlin. What’s up?”

“Hey, Barry. Are you busy?”

Barry looks over his shoulder at the document waiting on his computer screen. “Ish,” he says. “Did you find something out?”

“I did. Joe mentioned that the CIA took the first body so when we came to get you last night, I took skin and blood samples. His DNA has been altered.”

“Altered how?”

“I’m not entirely sure why or how, yet. Did you notice when you were studying those first samples, that there were no telomeres?”

“None?”

“None. They weren’t just short, they were gone. That’s just not something that happens naturally. The cells of a dead 100 year old should have _some_ left.”

“... This just keeps getting weirder and weirder,” Barry sighs, scrubbing his free hand over his face.

“It actually makes a bit of sense. If this is a problem all members of… Mob Rule are having, I mean. They stole a bunch of lab supplies and a gene re-coding device. They’re sick and trying to fix it.”

“Huh,” Barry says. That part actually does make sense. Barry’s just hung up on the part where it includes his old roommate. He looks over his shoulder at Julian, who appears to be too deeply absorbed in his work to notice, and then gets up and heads out onto the landing, anyway. “Is it something that can be fixed?”

“Theoretically? Maybe? We’d need a viable template but the gene re-coder they were trying to steal should, again theoretically, fix this too. Telomeres are tricky and experimenting with them tends to cause cancer in subjects. It has to be what they’re trying to do though, don’t you think?”

Barry nods. “Makes sense. I’ll talk to Dr. Elias when I take the re-coder back to him.”

“Sounds good. I’ll see you later, Barry. Be careful.”

“You know me.”

“I know. Be careful.”

Barry laughs. “Bye, Caitlin.”

The rest of the work day takes an impossibly long time to pass. Barry fidgets and Julian gripes about it and Barry gets what amounts to very little work done. At one point, he realizes that he has drawn a half decent dog on a coroner’s report and he does his best to cover it up with a red sticky arrow that points to a bland paragraph about partially digested food.

***

At 7:05, Barry speeds into the lobby of Stagg Industries, fully suited up and carrying Dr. Elias’s portable gene re-coder. He has a pretty hilarious moment in the elevator with a man in a lab coat who stares silently at him for the whole ride and Barry can’t resist the cheerful smile he flashes when the doors open for him.

“Later, man,” he says.

The scientist looks as shocked as if Barry had slapped him. “Hi,” he answers, breathlessly, as the doors close between them.

Over the comm, he hears Cisco laugh. “What was that?”

“Nothing. I seem to be super impressive.”

“Don’t get an ego on me, it’s just our suit.”

Dr. Darwin Elias is alone in a spacious corner office when Barry finds him and his face lights up at the sight of his stolen device. He looks so boyishly excited that Barry has to grin a little. Behind the thrill of running, Barry thinks this part is what comes next on his list of favorite things about his night job.

“Think I found something of yours,” Barry says, his voice disguised, and Dr. Elias practically sprints over to take back the gene re-coder.

“Thank you so much,” he says, shaking Barry’s hand vigorously. “This is the product of years of effort. I was absolutely devastated. Thank you, again, so much for bringing it back.” Barry watches him turn the device over, inspecting it for damage. He tuts at the sight of a scuff on the black casing and rubs at it with his finger.

“So, I have a friend,” Barry says and Dr. Elias looks back up. “She’s a geneticist, too, and she says that the guys who attacked the symposium have had their DNA altered. The guy who died here last night apparently… didn’t have any telomeres?” Dr. Elias’s eyebrows shoot up. “Yeah, right? You don’t... know anything about that, do you?”

“No,” the doctor answers, looking so properly bewildered by the information that Barry believes him instantly.

“Could your device fix something like that?”

Still looking a little thrown, Dr. Elias shakes his head. “I don’t… I’ve never dealt with anything like that. Theoretically, yes, I suppose. So long as we have a viable sequence to use as a template.”

“You know, they might come back for it. Can I see your phone?” 

Dr. Elias looks more confused than ever but he does dig his phone out and pass it over. Barry installs Cisco’s panic button app and hands it back. 

“If they come back, hit that. It sets off an alarm at my… base.” He hears Cisco laughing in his ear again.

“All your base are belong to me,” Cisco says and Barry has to bite his lip.

Luckily, the doctor is taking a moment to study the app. His expression, when he looks back up, is pleased. “Well, thank you again, Flash.”

Barry shrugs it off with a smile. “No problem. Be safe, Doctor.”

His exit is dramatic only as long as it takes to make it back to the elevator bank. 

***

“You know,” Barry says into the comm once he’s standing on the sidewalk outside Stagg Industries. “That first guy we found… He’s been spending time in the Badlands recently.”

“Sounds like a good place to hide an army of clones,” Cisco answers, catching on immediately.

“I might do some exploring. If they’re really just sick and trying to get better, then we have an olive branch to extend.”

“Aaawww,” Cisco answers and Barry rolls his eyes. “See, _Flash_ , this is why I like working with you.”

Barry shakes his head. “Just do me a favor and look for anything that could narrow down my search.”

“On it,” Cisco answers.

The Badlands’ only redeeming quality, in Barry’s opinion, is the absolutely insane number of stars visible in its night sky. Other than that, he kind of hates the place. This situation has him antsy, though, so Barry taps into the Speed Force and hits the road. He’s ready for actual answers, to confront Manny or, at least, one of his mysterious doppelgangers.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be in the cards, tonight. 

Barry is stopped on the Gem City bridge by a sound he’s never heard before and he turns in time to see a burst of brilliant green light high above Central City. Over the comm, he hears Cisco swear.

“Did you see that? That was an EMP blast. Oh shit. That could’ve been really bad.”

“I saw it,” Barry answers. “Where did it come from?”

“Somewhere way too close for comfort. I can’t really trace it…” Cisco pauses and the quiet gives Barry the chance to register a strange droning that grows louder the longer he listens. “Uh oh,” Cisco says, just as Barry spots it. “Uh oh, uh oh, Barry, there’s a-.”

“A plane,” Barry says, his eyes wide as he watches a 747 drawing near, its lights off, engines screaming. His blood runs cold and Barry looks frantically along the line of vehicles extending down the bridge toward Central City. “Cisco, it’s going to hit the bridge.” 

Barry’s quickfire brain offers him one of the craziest plans he’s ever come up with on his own. He thinks about phasing through the street with Manny’s dead clone and tries to imagine how much more difficult it would be to do something similar with an entire passenger plane.

“Cisco,” he says, again, raising his voice to be heard over the roar of the crashing plane. “I’m going to try to phase the plane through the bridge.”

“Oohh,” Cisco answers. “Oh, man, that’s nuts. What if you blow up the bridge?”

Barry is already moving though. Immersed in the Speed Force, the seconds drag by as he positions himself on top of a transport truck and waits. The approaching plane is immense - and quite possibly one of the most terrifying things that Barry’s ever seen. The sound of it fills his ears and thrums through his entire body as it draws nearer and Barry probably couldn't actually deal with this in real time. He can barely deal with it in slow motion.

Once the plane is close enough, Barry takes a deep breath and then a running leap off the back of the truck. It’s an utterly bizarre sensation, flying at supersonic speeds toward a crashing plane but then Barry has phased through the bottom and into the aisle of the passenger deck. Before anyone aboard has time to register the sudden appearance of Central City’s own personal superhero, Barry drops to his knees and plants his hands on the floor and _wills_ the plane and its passengers to vibrate with him.

For the people around him, the experience is over too fast for their brains to really comprehend what’s happening but Barry watches it all because the timing here is absolutely critical. If he keeps it up too long, they’ll phase right into the river and drown. If he stops too soon, merging with the bridge would probably be entirely disastrous. If he vibrates at the wrong frequency, he risks blowing the bridge up the same way he’d blown up the road outside Stagg Industries. The pressure in this moment is off the charts, so he holds on and he watches the bridge pass through the plane and the people on it and it takes more effort than he’s ever put into anything in his life.

Then he lets go and there is a great jolt as the plane hits the surface of the water, followed soon by a deep, thrumming groan as its nose scrapes the riverbed. He can hear the people around him screaming but all he’s capable of at this point is collapsing into an ungainly sprawl on the carpeted aisle. He can hear Cisco on the comm, absolutely losing his mind, but the words all jumble together for Barry who just rolls onto his back, trying to get his breath again.

“Oh my god, you did it! You just phased a 747 through a suspension bridge full of cars, Barry, holy shit!”

“Ugh,” Barry answers, exhausted. He heaves a sigh and lets his eyes slip shut. “I need like… 850 tacos.”

Cisco laughs a little hysterically. “Oh, man, you _so_ earned them.”

In the cabin of the plane, the passengers are beginning to notice both him and the fact that they’re not as dead as they probably expected to be, judging by the chatter that has replaced the earlier sounds of terror. One small nearby voice actually seems to be speaking to him rather than about him, though.

“Here, Flash.”

Barry opens his eyes and then goes a little cross-eyed trying to focus on a candy bar about an inch from his nose. He follows a scrawny little arm all the way up to the candy bar’s very young owner and can’t help the breathless laugh that slips out of him. He pushes himself up into a sitting position and accepts the candy bar.

“Thanks, little dude,” Barry says, and even the effort needed to disguise his voice feels like a lot right now. It makes the boy beam, though.

“I don’t have tacos,” he explains. Barry just shrugs and tears open the wrapper.

“This’ll cover me until I can make it to the tacos.”

“Is that where your speed comes from?”

This time several people laugh, Cisco included, and the boy laughs too even though he doesn't seem to know why.

“You never know,” Barry says, taking a bite of the candy bar.

He finishes it while accepting thanks from the plane’s passengers and crew but then Cisco comes over the comm to let him know that the Coast Guard is on the way. Shaking a few more of the hands extended toward him, Barry begs off with a smile and a wave for the grateful crowd and then phases out of the plane so that he can make the run back to S.T.A.R. Labs.

***

“That was officially the coolest thing you’ve ever done,” Cisco informs Barry the moment he enters the Cortex, loaded down with Taco Bell. “I mean, holy shit, you phased a whole plane full of people through a bridge covered with cars!” By the time Cisco is done, he is gesturing so wildly that Barry has to dodge to avoid being slapped in the face. “I’m not even gonna lie. I am fanboying you so hard right now.”

Caitlin, meanwhile, is on the opposite end of the spectrum. “You look like you’re going to pass out. Sit down and eat,” she says, no nonsense, as she pushes him down into her chair. Then, a bit of a grin overtakes her concerned expression and she adds, “That was really awesome, though.” 

“So crazy cool,” Cisco agrees. He drops into his chair and rolls to his workstation. “Come here, look, I took video from the bridge’s traffic cam. It’s the coolest thing you’ve ever seen in real life.”

It kind of is. While Barry’s angle on the whole adventure had been pants-wetting levels of terrifying, on the screen it looks like magic as the plane passes right through the bridge and the cars on it, hitting the river below with a magnificent splash. He can hardly believe, even with his heart still beating a little off kilter, that he’s the one responsible for it.

“And you didn’t even blow the bridge up,” Cisco continues, cheerfully. Barry snorts.

“Thanks, man.”

***

Iris’s text is simple but it triggers alarms in Barry’s head, all the same.

 _Barry, please come to my apartment_ , it says. Not, _hey, babe, you should drop by_ , or, _wanna come over_ or any of the other casual ways she would normally phrase such an invitation. Barry, it says, which means she doesn’t need the Flash or specifically doesn’t want the Flash or possibly that she wasn’t thinking about it at all and just sent a text expecting her boyfriend not to be paranoid. He polishes off his sixteenth taco and lets Cisco and Caitlin know where he’s going.

“Is everything all right,” Caitlin wants to know and Barry, whose impossibly quick brain won’t quit analyzing Iris’s text, shrugs. 

“If it’s not, you’ll be the first ones to know. I mean, if it’s trouble trouble not… Uh, personal trouble.” Caitlin quirks her eyebrows at him so he hurries to elaborate further. “It’s probably all right. I probably worry too much.”

He changes rapidly into his street clothes and zips out of S.T.A.R. Labs, all the same.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HE PHASED A PLANE THROUGH A BRIDGE! [Here](http://imgur.com/a/8dgp3)


	3. What Really Happened

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Barry finally comes face to actual face with his old buddy.

There is tension in Iris’s expression when she opens her door but she smiles at him, small, just enough to make him feel better, and says, “you’re not going to believe who dropped by.”

She steps aside for him and motions toward the living room. Barry gives her a curious look but she just shakes her head. Honestly, he should have probably expected it but he expects it so little that the sight of Manuel Lago, rough and filthy looking, sitting on Iris’s overstuffed sofa actually makes him jump.

“Holy shit,” he says, owl-eyed. There is a quiet snort behind him and he turns, gives Iris an incredulous look. She holds her hands up.

“It’s not funny. I totally get that.”

“Barry,” Manny says and Barry turns back.

“Ok, sorry I just need to… You’re the third one of you I’ve seen this week.”

“Ha,” Manny says. “Yeah, about that. Boy, do I have a story to tell you.”

“Ha,” Barry agrees, frowning.

“Remember how I wanted to join the CIA,” Manny asks, his voice dry, and this time Barry’s surprised laugh is real.

“Rings a bell,” he says.

Manny stares at him for a moment and then looks past him to where Iris is still standing. “Ok, look. It’s really me. Whatever weird shit you’ve seen… at work, I guess?” Manny gives him a curious look.

“Yeah. CSI, remember?”

“Whatever weird shit you’ve seen, I’m actually me. Uh… Manuel Prime, if you will.”

“What are you doing in Iris’s apartment?”

It’s the quick flash of hurt that crosses Manny’s expression that actually convinces Barry. It has the added bonus of making him feel a bit guilty.

“I need help,” he answers, shrugging. “You two are the only friends I still have. Right? I would’ve gone to you but I couldn’t find you and I’m… I mean, to be honest, I’m still kind of scared of Joe. Straight up.” Manny lets out a nervous laugh.

Barry feels a hand on his back and is just a little bit surprised to see Iris beside him, giving him a look that means she wants him to give Manny a shot. She pushes a little and Barry sighs, allows himself to be guided to a seat.

“So, you’ve already seen two of them. I guess that makes this easier?” Manny says once they’re settled on the loveseat together. He scrubs a hand through his dirty hair, looking thoughtful, then shrugs and sighs and adds, “My life is like some weird sci-fi flick right now, you have no idea.”

“Hm,” Barry answers, trying for sympathetic, and Manny nods miserably. Barry clears his throat. “So what… Who are they?”

Manny seems to be struggling for the words so Barry waits him out. After a drawn out moment of silence, he gets this weird little grin on his face and says, “They are pieces of me. Like, literally.”

“I have literally no idea what that means.”

Manny laughs and Barry kind of wants to shake the point out of him. “Ok. So. About a year in, I was approached for this program. I’d been hurt but they said they could fix it and it was supposed to take me into spec ops so, of course, I agreed. They said they could… Ok, I said sci-fi flick. They said they thought they could give me, well, superpowers basically.”

“Wow,” Barry answers when Manny stops to wait for him to. 

“Yeah. I was kind of disappointed at first? I thought I was going to get specialized training and they’re talking about some comic book shit. I mean, it was before all this started happening in Central City. They had this plan though and all these people, crazy smart like you, and they’d already had one success. So I did it and it… Well.” Manny stops again and sits up a little straighter, pulls his shirt up to show off a shiny pink scar on his flank. “I got shot five hours ago. Now, it looks like this.”

“Jesus, Manny,” Barry says. “Who shot you?”

“I still have to explain them.”

The story almost sounds like one of Oliver’s, really. Manny - enhanced in nearly every way, everything from his strength to his agility and speed, riding a wave of fearlessness born of his new ability to heal - had been unleashed on the same places Barry had been watching on the news. The same places Manny had always sworn he’d go. He’d killed people - enemy combatants, he calls them - sometimes alone and sometimes with help.

“I was… not a very good person,” Manny says and, at the moment, Barry can’t find it in himself to argue. It had been a solo mission gone wrong that ended up leading to their current predicament. Manny had been captured and tortured for information or revenge. “Or both,” Manny guesses, shrugging. “They realized that… whatever they cut off, it would just… grow back so they could keep doing it over and over again.” He laughs like he thinks it might actually lighten the mood but Iris looks horrorstruck and Barry can only imagine he does too. “I don’t know. I don’t remember all the details. I was there for a while and then one day, out of the blue, I was… rescued. By a whole bunch of guys who looked just like me. They said they woke up out behind the compound. Usually in pairs, sometimes in groups of five or ten.” He waves the fingers of one hand meaningfully at them and flashes a smile that’s more than a little manic.

Barry puts two and two together and can actually feel the blood drain out of his face. “Oh god,” he says and Manny nods. “How-... How many of them are there?”

Manny’s eyes cut toward the ceiling and Barry waits, feeling a little bit ill. “I’m not sure how many there still are but, when I got out, their numbers went all the way up to 92 or 93.” He lets out another laugh, just as incongruous as the last. “That’s what they go by. Numbers. As in, from the order they woke up.”

“Got out,” Iris interjects. “I thought they rescued you?”

For the first time, Manny’s expression seems to match the story he’s telling. “Things went south. For one thing they were fucking creepy. They all had my memories so they would have these crazy arguments about which one gave the biggest shit about my mother or which one remembered hanging out with you guys before everything went to hell-.”

It’s Barry’s turn to interrupt. “They know us?”

“About as well as I do,” Manny answers, looking somewhat contrite. “That’s the other part of the reason I came here. I wanted to warn you both. I’ve already got Mom out of town but you guys… I’ve heard stories.”

“Stories?”

“You know the Flash,” Manny says to Iris. “You write about him all the time. Everybody knows you know him. Barry, you work as a CSI in metahuman central. Joe actually works with the Flash and heads up an anti-metahuman taskforce. Right?”

Barry and Iris exchange a look.

“... Right,” Iris says.

“So, if anybody can help me with my... issue, it’s you guys and your super buddy, right?”

“What do they even want with you,” Barry asks.

“They think I’m the key to fixing them. They’ve got something wrong with them. Only live a few months and then they just die. First time it happened, guy was in the middle of a sentence and _wham_. Just fell down dead. And then it kept happening. In the order they’d been, ‘born.’” Manny looks conflicted for a moment, then shakes his head. “They’re not… They aren’t me. They know what I knew before they were created and they have my memories but they’re not me and, until they figure out how they can use me to fix their problem, they only know one way to… uh… keep their numbers up. They thought I would just go along with it or something…”

Iris looks at Barry again, pity for their old friend written clearly in her expression. He knows that she’s already on board, that she’s just waiting for him to agree.

“What can we do,” he finally says, after the quiet has dragged on long enough to make Manny fidget.

Manny sags, letting out a quiet huff of relief. “Get in touch with your friend for me. Joe, maybe, if he doesn't still hate me. I would pay you actual money to use your shower if I had any and I haven’t eaten in two days.”

“Go,” Iris says, pointing toward the hall. “Shower’s that way. Bathroom’s the only door that’s shut.”

Manny grins and favors Iris with an exaggerated bow once he’s gotten to his feet. “Iris West, you are a queen among women.”

“Go,” Iris says again, rolling her eyes. “We can order pizza while you’re in.”

“And call the Flash?”

“He’s kind of a busy guy,” Barry says, “but, yeah, we’ll call him too.”

Manny nods, his gaze dropping. “Thanks guys,” he says, his voice a little thicker than before. “I mean it. I know we didn’t exactly part on the best of terms and this… I don’t know if this is even safe or if I’m putting you in danger by being here - I probably am - I just didn’t know where else to go. So, thanks. For not kicking me out or something.”

“Of course not,” Iris says, her smile soft and a little sad. “We’re just glad you’re ok.”

Once Manny has disappeared into the bathroom, Barry lets out a gusty sigh and slumps into the couch’s overstuffed cushions.

“I wish things would go wrong just like… one at a time, maybe,” he says, and Iris answers with a dry laugh.

***

“Good God,” is Joe’s reply to Barry’s abridged version of Manny’s story. “This world gets nuttier every day.”

“Tell me about it. He wants to talk to the Flash, so I’m going to meet him at Iris’s place tomorrow while I’m supposed to be at work so I’ll have a good excuse for not being here too.” Barry has to stop after the words are out, his brow furrowing. “As me. As Barry.”

He hears something that might be a chuckle and Joe says, “I don’t envy you, son. Let me know what I can do to help.”

They end the call and Barry, alone on Iris’s balcony, sighs and looks skyward, feeling antsy and a little overwhelmed. Manny’s sudden reappearance has been an emotional roller coaster, from the grief of finding that first body, the confusion, and the danger, all on top of old baggage and the lingering mystery of Alchemy. The implications of Manny’s story sit like weights on him, the torture and the surreality of it all. Somewhere nearby is a small army, all desperate to save their own lives. They hadn’t shown themselves to be especially violent, something that Barry had been clinging to, but if they’d been willing to cut pieces from a living breathing human being he’s not quite so confident that he can anymore. His preferred MO will always be to help, or at least hinder, rather than harm but Barry doesn’t feel as much like a trip to the Badlands as he had earlier. 

Still feeling conflicted, Barry slides open the balcony door just in time to hear Iris say to Manny, “Oh my god, is _that_ why you wouldn’t date me?” 

“Um…?” Barry says and Iris lets out a laugh that is equal parts delighted and embarrassed. 

“In college,” she clarifies. “I tried flirting with him, he shut me down.” Here she gives Manny a light shove on the arm. “ _Hard_ ,” she adds.

“You would’ve never spoken to me again,” Manny says, looking up at Barry. “Right?”

Barry huffs a noncommittal sound, cocks his head. “You never mentioned that.” 

“‘Hey, Bear, your super hot lifelong crush just tried to ask me out and I had to say no and it sucked,’ doesn’t sound like a conversation I really wanted to have in college,” Manny says. 

Barry doesn’t really know quite what to say or how to feel about this new information, so he picks up a slice of pizza and takes a seat between them. Manny budges over to make room.

“Joe’s willing to help and so is the Flash. He can’t come tonight cause he’s tied up but he can be here tomorrow around eleven.” He doesn’t miss Iris’s stifled laugh.

“Hey, lunch with the Flash,” Manny says. “You’ll be working, then, won’t you?” Barry nods and Manny says, “Ah, that sucks…”

“Nah, it’s… I’ve seen him before and I can catch up after I’m done with work.”

“Thanks, Barry.” Manny claps him on the shoulder, his expression earnest. “You’re a really good friend. Always have been.”

Barry, who has been actively lying to Manny about half the time he’s had his mouth open tonight, doesn’t quite know what to say to that so he shrugs. “You’d do the same for us, right,” is what he finally decides on but it comes out sounding more uncertain than he’d meant for it to. He can tell by the subtle shift in Manny’s expression that he’s noticed.

“I would,” he says, quietly.

***

“Hey,” Iris says, later, once they’re curled up in her bed together with the lights off and the blankets up. She rolls onto her side to face him, her brown eyes soft in the low light. “You kinda looked freaked out about that whole thing with Manny earlier…”

“Uh, yeah.” Barry answers. “I just found out that my old roommate is a meta with an army of angry clones who grew from his severed body parts.”

Iris huffs, rolling her eyes at him. “Well, of course that part was freaky. I meant later when I told you that I’d hit on him in college.”

“Oh,” Barry says. “I just never knew you two were interested in each other, I guess. It’s no big deal?” He kind of hates the way that last bit turns into a question, seemingly of its own accord, but Iris smiles at him anyway.

“Not even a little bit,” she says. “You’re not worried about it, are you?”

Barry considers this. It’s true that Iris has a history of crushes on guys who could bench press him and it’s also true that Manny fits that description. So, it’s not all that surprising that a younger, brasher Manny had been one of them. He’d never suspected, especially not after Manny’s downward moral spiral had put a strain on all their relationships and, really, the more he thinks about it the more he thinks he’s actually not as worried as he’d expected himself to be.

“I kind of thought I’d be but, I mean… You don’t seem worried about it and I trust you, so…” He shrugs.

Iris likes it as an answer, Barry guesses, if the way she’s suddenly all up in his space, kissing him to within an inch of his life, is anything to go by.

***

When Barry makes it to work the next morning, a skip in his step, all anyone seems to be talking about is the disaster he’d prevented. Every morning news show that’s playing is showing the same traffic cam video that Cisco had pulled up last night or talking to people that Barry sort of remembers shaking hands with in his post crash haze. Joe meets his eyes, nodding toward the television, and gives Barry an impressed look. Barry grins like an idiot.

“He said he has taco powers,” the little boy from last night tells a reporter, high voice ringing through the room and several of the officers laugh. Barry laughs too but makes his way across the room to Joe as the little boy goes on to talk about how he’d given a candy bar to the Flash.

“I did not say I have taco powers,” Barry says and Joe lets out one of his rich chuckles.

“Your next action figure’s gonna come with teeny tiny tacos.” Joe uses his fingers to, apparently, indicate the tiny size of the toy tacos, looking entirely too amused by the idea.

“I have work to do,” Barry answers, maybe just a little bit bratty, and Joe’s laughter follows him up the stairs.

“Allen, I am absolutely astounded. You’re on time,” Julian says when Barry enters the lab at - Barry checks his phone - 9:56 am. Julian looks at his computer screen and then does a double take and the exaggerated surprise in his expression becomes a little more genuine. “In fact, you’re _early_.”

Instead of admitting that he will be disappearing in an hour, Barry makes jazz hands. “Ta da.”

And that’s as far as they take it.

***

When Barry ducks out of the station again at 10:55, he actually does feel kind of bad about it. Not bad enough that he doesn’t immediately speed to S.T.A.R. Labs to get his suit and let the team know what’s going on, but bad enough to notice. He kind of likes his budding camaraderie with Julian, after all.

Caitlin and HR are chatting in the cortex when Barry gets there - or rather, HR is chatting at Caitlin who is watching him with an expression of low level confusion on her face. She looks almost relieved when Barry whooshes in.

“Morning, Barry,” she chirps, pushing back her windswept hair. “How’d it go with Iris?”

“Oh wow,” Barry says, because he’d totally just followed Iris to bed last night without bothering to bring anyone up to speed. “I forgot to call you. I know what’s going on with Mob Rule, now.”

“How did you forget to call about _that_?” 

Barry shrugs. “It was a really weird night.”

Barry’s only halfway through his latest iteration of Manny’s macabre story when HR pulls out a pad of paper and a pen and begins to take notes. He looks entirely too excited for a story about severed body parts and POW camps.

“You know, on my Earth, the UEG tried to institute a clone army program but it failed after the clone rights movement kicked up. They all looked the same but they were individuals and some of them just didn’t want to fight.” HR shrugs. “In fact, about twenty of them formed this really fantastic _a capella_ group and ended up world famous - which, as you can imagine, helped push the clone rights movement forward...”

Barry stops listening.

“... They did a _really_ good cover of Rob Zimmerman’s Rich Girl…”

“So,” Barry says. “I’m going to bring Manny back here, I think.” He nods at Caitlin. “You’ve already had the chance to look at a sample of their DNA. Maybe we can work out some way to help these guys before they get too desperate.”

“You know, that’s exactly what I was getting at,” HR says, enthusiastic as ever.

Barry can’t tell whether Caitlin is amused by HR or annoyed by him and, maybe, neither can she. She just blinks at him for a moment and then looks back at Barry. “Yes. I mean, yes, that sounds fine. I’ll call Cisco while you’re gone. I’m pretty sure he’ll want to be here.” 

Barry looks between the two of them, unable to really help the smirk trying to start on his face. “Sit tight. I’ll be back in a-.”

Caitlin jabs a finger in his direction. “No.”

“Ok.”

***

Meeting Manny as the Flash is about as weird as expected. For one thing, he thinks the Flash is _awesome_ and he’s not remotely embarrassed of showing it. 

“Badass,” he says, shamelessly walking a full circle around Barry to check out the suit, a big stupid grin lighting up his whole face. “Oh, man. This is so cool. How do you do that blurry thing with your face? Are you just shaking your head really fast?”

“Ahem,” Barry answers, voice modulated. Over Manny’s shoulder he sees Iris trying and failing to cover a smile with her hand. “I understand you’re the guy to talk to about Mob Rule.”

“Oh god,” Manny says, scrubbing a hand over his face. “They have a code name. They’ve been a big enough pain in the ass that you gave them a code name.”

Barry snorts. “That about sums up the ones we end up naming, yeah.”

Manny’s expression goes just a bit mournful. “Sorry. I feel sort of… guilty by proxy. Sorry.”

Barry ends up having to sit through the whole thing all over again, even after Manny confirms that Barry had, ‘shared,’ the gist of the story with the Flash already. It’s no better the second time around. 

He can’t help noticing, especially after Iris excuses herself to leave for work, that this retelling lacks the artifice. Somehow, clean and rested and fed, Manny looks more exhausted than ever as he tells Barry again about the capture and the torture, being rescued by his own mirror images only to have the torture start all over. Now that he’s heard and told and thought about this story long enough for the shock to begin to wear off, Barry finds he doesn’t have room to feel much more than painfully sorry for his old friend.

“I keep thinking of new things that seem important,” Manny says, breaking the silence that descends after he finishes the story. “Especially if you end up in a situation where they’re trying to get violent with you. Some of them do that more readily than the others. That’s actually one thing you need to know. The higher their number, the more likely they’re just batshit. The newer ones are meaner than the older ones. If you meet someone called like… I dunno, 92, that guy’s probably an asshole.”

“Huh,” Barry answers. “That… makes a morbid kind of sense.”

Manny offers a humorless smirk in return. “Right? Another thing, maybe or maybe not more important than the last… They’re connected. Like… I don’t know how deep it goes or how full the connection is but they have this mental bond with each other. I don’t know if they’re actually telepathic but one always seems to know what the other’s doing or feeling.”

Barry thinks back to the symposium, to the incredible speed and precision of the strike. He’s not being cocky when he thinks that his own speed is the only thing that stopped Mob Rule from achieving their goal, not taken unawares the way they’d been, not when the whole thing had been over in little more than a minute.

“Manny,” Barry says, a rather disturbing thought occurring to him. “They can’t… do that with you, right?”

Manny shrugs. “I don’t know. I haven’t got a clue how it works. It’s just pretty obvious that it does.”

“Maybe we should get out of Iris’s apartment,” Barry suggests. “Just in case.”

Manny looks guilt stricken at the idea. “I never even thought of that. I mean, I didn’t think that involving Iris and Barry was going to be the safest for them but I didn’t even consider that I might be leading those guys right to her door. I just… I just didn’t know where else to go.”

“Hey,” Barry says, because Manny seems to be getting upset. “No, man, I’m glad you reached out. I have a friend at S.T.A.R. Labs, she’s a geneticist. She already knows what’s going on and she might be able to help these guys. If we could fix their… dying problem do you think they’d leave you alone?”

Manny is silent for so long that Barry wonders if he’s going to have to snap him back to attention. Then Manny looks up and his expression is dark and he says, “I don’t know if I want you to help them.”

Barry draws a quick breath, holding Manny’s gaze. “You want to let them all die?”

Manny’s laugh sounds wrong and his smile is chilling. Barry feels it in his gut, heavy and cold, as Manny says, “That’s not the half of what I want. I want to cut pieces off of them while they watch. I want to make them want to die and then I want to let it happen. That’s what I want. But you’re the only one I can think of to go to and I get the idea you’re not going to want me doing that.”

“Yeah, no,” Barry says.

“It’s why I asked for you.” Manny shrugs, his eerie coldness overtaken now by an exhausted sort of resignation. “I’m a terrible person, you have no idea, but you… You help terrible people all the time. You’ve saved the lives of serial murderers, for crying out loud. I just… I need someone who can look at people like that.”

There is another thick silence. Barry feels like he’s speaking to an entirely different person than the man who’d sat around eating pizza with them last night and, for a long tense moment, they simply eye one another. Even on his worst days, the Manny who had lived with Barry four years ago had never been someone Barry would believe capable of cold blooded torture. This Manny, he’s not so sure and, honestly, he has a harder time holding it against him than he’d like. He can’t imagine what Manny has been through; his story still sounds like something out of a comic book, too crazy to be something real people could survive. The shadow in Manny’s eyes is real, though, and Barry knows that turning him away only leaves him vulnerable.

Finally, Barry says, “come to S.T.A.R. Labs with me. We can talk about what to do from there.”

Manny visibly relaxes. “Thank you,” he says and Barry nods. “You know, you’re really as nice as everybody says you are.”

Barry can’t think of anything to say to that so he shrugs and smiles a little even though Manny won’t really be able to see it. “Wanna go for a run?”

“Fucking yes,” Manny says.

Barry’s smile grows into a full on grin. He grabs a handful of Manny’s shirt and flashes them out the door. 

It’s as far as they get.

Mob Rule lines the hallway, fully decked out in their black body armor and fatigues, black masks concealing faces that Barry knows will look identical to Manny’s. One of them is stretched out at Barry’s feet, unmoving, and Barry wonders if he’s died out here in the hallway waiting for them before tearing his eyes away and turning his attention to those who are still standing. There might be more guns here than Barry’s ever seen in one place and Barry has worked in Starling City with the Green Arrow. A frission of cold fear runs through his whole body as his brain connects their presence to the location, to Iris’s apartment. To Iris.

Beside Barry, Manny is rigid. He meets Barry’s blurred gaze, his own eyes full of fear that doesn’t manage to leak through anywhere else.

“Hey buddy,” says the mercenary nearest to Manny, nudging him in the side. “You left.”

“You cut off both my hands and shot me,” Manny answers, crossing his arms, bitterly incredulous.

“Ok, we shot you _after_ you’d already started trying to escape,” the clone defends and Barry looks between the two of them with his brow furrowed. It is entirely bizarre, listening to Manny’s voice coming from two different men.

Barry doesn’t feel quite as certain about taking on this many of them at once, now that he knows they are actual individuals and not mindless replicas being controlled by a central source. Granted, he’s a lot faster than he’d been then. 

He’s also a lot more conscientious. 

“What are you doing here,” he demands and the clone who’d been talking to Manny looks at him.

“Hey, Flash,” the guy says, “Just came to fetch our progenitor.”

“And what makes you think I’m going to let you take him?”

The clone crosses his arms and shares a glance with his buddies. Barry can practically see that infuriating grin Manny gets when he’s playing with someone, even behind the mask.

“Maybe the fact that we have your reporter friend. Iris West,” the clone says and Barry feels that cold sensation replaced by something hot and hateful. “Look what she did,” the clone adds, nudging the man on the floor with his toe. He laughs, a strange echo of a laugh, warm with real humor, that Barry hasn’t heard since long before Manny had disappeared from his life. “He’s not dead, yet, actually. She beaned him. Got him right under the chin. Man, I remembered she could punch but this lady took down a super soldier. I kinda dig her.” 

Barry can hardly hear him around the blood rushing in his ears. His leather gloves creak as he clenches his fists. In an instant, he has two fistfuls of the clone’s body armor and is forcing his bulky frame up against the wall.

“Where is she,” he growls, the vibration adding a satisfyingly sinister edge to his voice.

“This isn’t how you find out,” the clone answers and, with surprising strength, pries Barry’s hands away from his gear. “It’s been great catching up. I mean, so I hear. I haven’t been catching up, I’ve been waiting for you. We’ve also got some guys waiting around CCPD to get Barry Allen when he comes out. Been a _real_ long time. I figure Manny would rather come back with us.” He shrugs his shoulders, turns toward Manny again. “Wouldn’t you?”

Barry looks at Manny, too, taking in his expression, now fully terrified, and tries to wrap his brain around the choice being presented. It’s not that he wouldn’t trade nearly anything in the world for Iris. He’s self-aware enough to know that she is a chink in his armor. It’s the realization that he wants to throw Manny at Mob Rule if it means getting her back that makes him feel awful. 

“I’ll go,” Manny says before Barry can come up with anything useful and Barry looks his way again, with a sharp flare of relief that only manages to make him feel worse. “I mean, Iris and Barry are civilians. I don’t… I didn’t want to get them this wrapped up in all this.”

“I’ll find you,” Barry promises and Manny nods.

Then Manny is grabbed, none too gently, by two of the clones and forced down the hallway. The clone who had spoken moves closer to Barry and holds out a pay-as-you-go phone. “We’ll call you with a location for Ms. West and let the guys know they can leave CCPD. If I even guess that you’re trying to follow us before that happens, we’ll kill her and it’s open season on Barry Allen.” Hearing these words in Manny’s voice makes Barry feel sick and he’s grateful that the clone can’t see the expression on his face through the blur. “See, I may remember those guys but I don’t really give a shit about them. I have all of the information with none of the emotional weight. So, basically, stay here. Count to a thousand or something. I’ll give you a call when you can go get your cheerleader.”

Then they file out, taking Manny with them, and Barry is left alone, so agitated that he’s practically vibrating. Or, actually vibrating, he realizes when he phases halfway through the floor before getting control of himself. He grunts in frustration, braces his hands on the carpet, and struggles to phase his lower half back out onto Iris’s floor without falling through completely.

“Barry, dude, your suit is kicking back some crazy vitals,” Cisco says in his ear. “We’ll get her back. I’m running facial scans on surveillance cameras around the city and Caitlin is trying to track her phone. We’ll get her back.”

Barry nods, frowning down at the phone in his hand. “We have to,” he says, and he knows that Cisco knows him too well to miss the waver in his voice.

“We will.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, that's it. There's Mob Rule, actually alive and doing things. I'm not gonna lie, I had way too much fun writing these guys for the next few chapters. They're so weird. Also, I guess please excuse me for not being able to end a chapter without phasing Barry through something being a semi-big part of it?
> 
> Visual aid for Mob Rule. [Here](http://imgur.com/a/l8ge9)


	4. Rescue and Reconnaissance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Barry tracks down his missing friends and ends up with a lot to think about.

Barry doesn’t know what to do. He spends a while pacing the hallway and listening to Caitlin and Cisco back in the cortex as they search, fruitlessly, for any sign of Iris. He has no idea how much time has passed. Everything is dragging by and so Barry paces and he stares at the silent phone in his hand and nearly flies out of his suit when he hears the creaking of a door being opened. 

“Flash?”

He turns to see one of Iris’s elderly neighbors, a woman Barry thinks is named Giselle, peeking out at him with wide eyes.

“Yeah,” he says, a little surprised to find himself out of breath. “Yeah, hi.”

“Who were those men? What happened?”

“They took Iris,” he says, before he can think better of it. “They took her and I can’t go after them until they call me or they’ll hurt her and, and-.”

“Whoa, son,” Giselle says, stepping fully into the hallway. “You’re kind of fast forwarding on me. Slow down. I think you started by saying they took Iris?”

Barry turns and braces his hands on the wall and takes a great big breath, trying to slow the supersonic pace of his frantic heartbeat. He nods.

“Oh no, the poor girl,” Giselle says, looking genuinely concerned. Barry thinks he remembers Iris mentioning her back when Eddie had been only recently deceased and maybe even that she’d shared some leftover chicken and dumplings with him that Giselle had left so Iris wouldn’t have to cook. “Things keep going wrong for her, it feels like. You’ll get her back, though, yeah? I saw what you did on TV with that airplane that was crashing. That was something else. If you can do that, you can get Iris back from those men.”

“I can’t find her,” he says. He realizes that the comm has gone silent and, then, that he hasn’t bothered to disguise his face or voice. He considers it for a split second and then doesn’t bother. “I have to wait for them to call me and tell me where she is.”

“Come in, then, and wait in here. No need to pace the hallway. All I could hear was, ‘ _whoosh whoosh whoosh_.’”

So, Barry follows Giselle into her apartment and sits at her kitchen table while she makes tea that he doesn’t drink. She doesn’t pester him about it or try to make him talk, just lets him sit and stare at the phone and Barry feels a rush of unanticipated gratitude for this friendly old woman who he’s never really looked twice at. 

“Barry,” Caitlin says after ten minutes have passed according to the floral clock over Giselle’s kitchen sink. “We’re not getting anything. Facial recognition isn’t picking her up anywhere and her phone is either off or damaged.” She sounds almost hesitant to admit it and Barry forces himself to take a few deep breaths.

“Thanks for looking,” he says. 

“You talking to me or someone in your hat,” Giselle asks and Barry looks up at her, a surprised laugh slipping out before he can help it.

“Uh… In my hat. My friends are looking for her for me.”

“Good,” Giselle says, nodding. “It’s good to know you have people helping you do all this crazy stuff you do.”

Barry nods, managing something near to a smile despite the circumstances. “Yeah, it really is.”

The pay-as-you-go phone rings exactly thirty minutes later and Barry gets an address from a man speaking with Manny’s voice. He repeats the address so that Caitlin and Cisco can hear it and, a few seconds later he hears an affirmative sound from Cisco.

“Yeah, man, she just got dropped out of a van on Riverside. She doesn’t look hurt and the van is leaving.”

“Oh, thank god,” Barry says. “We got her,” he adds, looking up at Giselle who claps excitedly. Barry, feeling a little bit bad at the sight of his untouched cup of tea, knocks it back at superspeed and then offers Giselle a grateful look. “Thanks,” he says, voice heavy with feeling. “You didn’t have to do this.”

“Oh, hush,” Giselle answers, waving at him. “I don’t mind making a cup of tea for the Flash.”

Barry thanks her again anyway and then zips out of her apartment to get Iris.

***

Barry follows Cisco’s instructions to an intersection on Riverside Drive and, sure enough, there’s Iris. She looks a little rumpled and a lot pissed off but she also looks unhurt and Barry feels a swell of relief in his chest as he skids to a stop beside her.

“Barry! I- I mean, Flash, oh my god-.”

Barry scoops her into his arms and then flashes them up the side of the nearest building. On the roof, he lets her go only long enough for her feet to touch the ground and then pulls her into a tight, shaking hug that she returns with what feels like all the strength in her body. They stay like that for a long moment and Barry practically aches to feel her there, safe in his hold.

“I’m so glad you’re ok,” he says, pressing kisses into her hair and Iris nods, squeezing him - if possible - even more tightly than before.

“They didn’t hurt me. They just wanted Manny. Did they…?” Iris pulls away to meet his eyes, her expression worried now, but she doesn’t finish the question. Not that Barry needs her to.

“Yes,” he says, feeling again that shame that he’d felt earlier when he’d realized that he would have willingly handed his old friend over whether Manny had offered or not. “He… He offered to go and they said they’d kill you if I tried to follow them.”

“Oh god,” Iris says, her eyes wide. “They’re going to torture him.”

“I’m going to get him back,” Barry says. “Let me take you to S.T.A.R. Labs and then I’ll go after him. I have a pretty good idea they’re in the Badlands and I’m going to canvass every inch if I have to.”

“Ok,” Iris says, nodding. “Ok, let’s go.”

So, Barry scoops her up again and makes the run to S.T.A.R. Labs.

***

Joe is waiting in the cortex when they get there, a harried expression on his face that Barry can empathize with all too well. He’s still a little thrown when Joe gives him a look that’s very nearly furious.

“Why didn’t you call me when they took her,” he demands and Barry holds his hands up defensively.

“Whoa, I didn’t… I wasn’t even… I couldn’t even think straight, Joe.”

“Dad,” Iris says, taking her father by the shoulders and turning him away from Barry. “Everything is fine. They didn’t hurt me and Barry came for me as soon as he could. I am _fine_.”

Barry, Cisco, and Caitlin wait with bated breath as father and daughter share a moment of silent communication with each other, then Joe sort of crumples and Iris catches him up in a hug. He holds her tightly and Barry ends up looking off in the general direction of Caitlin’s lab while Joe’s emotions overtake him. If nothing else, he at least gets most of what Joe is feeling right now.

“So,” Cisco says to Iris, once Joe has composed himself and they all turn to look at him. “As you know, we kind of can’t help hearing what’s going on with Barry unless he doesn’t want us to and I distinctly remember hearing that you knocked out a super soldier. That’s badass, Iris.”

Iris scoffs. “Yeah. Might’ve done some good if there hadn’t been a whole platoon.”

“Still badass,” Cisco says, shrugging. “Either way, I was also listening when Barry mentioned the Badlands. I was going to use satellite imagery to try and narrow the search, remember? But the whole thing happened with the plane and we got distracted. Anyway, I tapped the S.T.A.R. Labs satellite and found this place…” He presses a series of buttons on his keyboard and suddenly there’s an aerial view of a large, rusting desert compound on the monitors around the room. “I don’t know about you but that looks like a creepy villain hideout if I ever saw one, and it’s big enough to hold a group the size of Mob Rule.” 

“It’s as good a place to start as any,” Barry says, already beginning to feel a little more like himself with Iris here and the semblance of a plan to get Manny back in the works. “Thanks, Cisco.”

“Hey, man. You got friends helping you do all this crazy stuff you do.”

Barry laughs and the feeling of normalcy settles in even further. “Yes, I do.”

***

At mach 4, Barry can cover .85 miles per second, which means he makes it the 45 miles to the compound Cisco has discovered in roughly 58 seconds. It takes less than one for him to know it’s the right place.

From his position in a copse of dry desert brush near a chainlink fence, Barry can see four of them, armed but unmasked and he watches them as they draw near, apparently surveilling the perimeter.

“... bitch straight up knocked me out,” one of them is saying and Barry is torn between annoyance and amusement. The clone’s companions, however, seem to feel no such conflict and several of them laugh openly. “It’s not funny. It’s fucking embarrassing.”

“You’re kind of embarrassing in general, 14,” says one of the others, prompting a few more chuckles. Barry thinks back on what Manny had said last night and estimates their numbers to be somewhere too close to a hundred for him to feel entirely comfortable, especially with them carrying what looks like military grade weaponry. “Anyway, don’t call her that. You know what she means to us.”

“To _Manny_ ,” 14 says, sounding bitter. “I don’t give a shit about her.”

“You give a shit about Manny.”

“25… Please shut the fuck up,” 14 says and that seems to end the conversation.

“Hey, guys,” Barry whispers, once they’ve moved too far away for him to hear what they’re saying anymore. “I’m looking at some guy called 14 and Manny said last night that they’d named themselves up to 93, last he remembers. That’s already almost eighty guys assuming 14’s the oldest.”

“Eighty guys with efficient healing and enhanced strength and agility. And crazy. It’s like a bunch of psycho Captain Americas with machine guns instead of shields.”

Barry blinks. “That’s… actually kind of terrifying,” he says.

“And it’s only, like, noon,” Cisco says. “You can’t stealth at noon. We didn’t think this through at all.”

Barry stares at the building for a few seconds and then shrugs. “I’ll just… I’ll just run in and out. I won’t give them time to do anything. I won’t try to fight too many of them all at once, just get Manny back.”

“Wait before you go. I bet I can find out what that building was and then I bet I can find some blueprints. We need to get efficient up in here.”

“Wait, guys?” This time it’s Iris’s voice in Barry’s ear. “There’s another thing we’re forgetting. Where exactly are we going to take him? They found him at my apartment because they have some kind of _psychic link_ to him. You don’t think they’d attack S.T.A.R. Labs to get him back?”

Before Barry can even begin to work out an answer for that admittedly pressing question, a shout from down the fence catches his attention. He moves a little closer to the perimeter guard that had passed him earlier.

“Fuck, 14’s down,” says one of the guards and, sure enough, Barry sees a figure sprawled at their feet. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, he woke up right before I did. Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck, I’m next.”

“Calm the hell down,” says one of the others to the agitated man Barry can only assume is 15. He leans down to pick up 14’s unmoving form and slings him over his shoulders. “Let’s just get him back.”

“Calm down? I could be dead in the next few minutes, what the fuck, _you_ calm down!” 

Barry would be lying if he tried to say, right now, that he doesn’t feel bad for this guy. He watches as they move toward the compound, carrying their fallen teammate, then says, “Did you guys hear that?”

“They’re really just dropping dead,” Caitlin answers, her voice small, and Barry gathers that she’s feeling just about like he is. “They’re scared.”

“Which makes them dangerous, Barry.” It’s Joe this time. “Maybe you should come back here long enough for us to come up with a more solid plan. You could go back when it’s dark so you won’t be wandering around a compound full of super soldiers in a red outfit at noon.”

It makes sense. It really does. Everything in Barry, though, seems to pull away from the idea. “That’s hours from now. There’s no telling what they could do to Manny in that time.” 

“I… might have an idea for hiding him from them, at least,” Cisco offers and Barry feels the tiniest spark of relief.

“Tell me.”

“Remember that headgear I made you when you went into the sewers after Grodd? Well, I fixed it. You know. It’s kinda sentimental. First thing we really did together without Eobard Thawne’s help. Plus, who knows when you’re gonna run into a crazy telepath, anymore? _Anyway_ , if it was strong enough to block out Grodd, it might just be strong enough to block out whatever lets them track your friend. Why not come back here, get the headgear and look at this blueprint I found, then you can go back and get Manny. If you run as fast as you just did, it’s not even two full minutes roundtrip.”

Barry can’t find anything in that to argue with and, apparently, neither can anyone in the cortex.

“Ok,” he says, relenting. “Ok, just give me a minute and I’ll be back.”

***

Cisco has the anti-telepathy headset waiting for Barry when he speeds back into the cortex. He’s also changed the image on the monitors to a scanned image of a yellowed old blueprint, the shape of the building depicted easily recognizable from the aerial view.

“It’s an old bottling plant,” Cisco says as Barry approaches one of the monitors for a better look. “See, this big open area must be the factory floor, here’s the shipping dock, and then you’ve got offices and storage space on the second level. If I were you, I’d peek into a few of these smaller rooms before hitting the factory floor. Too big. Room for too many of them to gang up on you. This will go best if you can get in and out with Manny before any of the others know you’re there.”

Barry listens, nodding as he follows Cisco’s plan around the blueprint. It’s not a bad plan, all told, especially considering how little information they actually have right now. 

“You’re gonna be flying by the seat of your pants in there, Bear,” Joe says, stepping up beside him. “You sure I can’t talk you out of this?”

“Not when they have Manny,” Barry says, resolute. “They were cutting pieces off him. While he was _awake_. They could be doing it right now.”

“You know what would be sneaky,” Cisco says. “Get up on the roof and phase through just a little bit. Ceiling cat them until you find Manny. Work your way down into the building if necessary, through rooms you know are empty.”

Barry laughs, despite himself, while Joe mouths, ‘ceiling cat,’ under his breath. “That sounds really stupid but also like it might work,” Barry allows.

“I know, right,” Cisco answers, looking pleased with himself.

***

A little over two minutes later, Barry is crouched outside the chainlink fence again, Cisco’s anti-telepathy headset clenched in his hand. He watches for a moment, just in case there’s going to be another perimeter guard moving toward him and then phases through the fence and runs up the side of the sand-caked old building.

Cisco’s idea turns out to be a pretty good one. He’s lucky enough that there are no guards patrolling the roof and so he spends a little time, moving around on his hands and knees and peeking in through the ceiling into the darkened rooms below. He feels kind of like an idiot but, after a little work, he’s also confident that the majority of the second floor is empty.

The first sign of life he actually sees is in the northwest corner. There are four members of Mob Rule sitting around a rusty old table, staring at each other, the tension so thick it’s nearly physical.

“... can’t believe you shot Dr. Guerrero,” one of them is saying and Barry goes still to listen.

“He wasn’t moving fast enough! I could have actual _minutes_ left.” Barry guesses that this is 15 again and he feels a surge of horror at the idea that someone has apparently been murdered in the time it took him to make it to S.T.A.R. Labs and back. 

“Yeah, well now you’re definitely going to die because the fucking doctor we got to help us has a bullet in his head. I swear, you’re fucking crazy, man. You’re too old to be this nuts.”

15’s face turns so red that Barry can see it even in the dim light of the room’s only lamp. He opens his mouth to protest… And then slaps face first onto the table without a word.

“Ah, shit,” says one of the others. “He’s dead.”

Barry wrenches himself back as the three living members of Mob Rule all get to their feet, presumably to deal with 15’s corpse. Watching it actually happen, seeing a man go from enraged to dead, just like that… it leaves Barry shaken and he sits there for what probably feels like a lot longer than it actually is while the absolute crazy of the situation sinks in a little further.

“Guys,” he says. “Another one of them just died. You should’ve seen it. He was going a mile a minute and then he just fell over dead. It’s kind of really hard to blame them for being scared.”

“Just get Manny out of there,” Iris says. “We can work on assigning blame and figure out what to do about Mob Rule when you’re both safe.”

So Barry ceiling cats the rest of the rooms on the second floor -and kind of hates himself for letting Cisco plant that term in his brain as an actual verb. He finds a darkened room with about fifteen men sleeping in military style racks, and another room that seems to have been set up as a recreation area but no Manny before he’s exhausted his second floor options.

He drops down into a dusty room filled with empty green bottles, stacked around the room in moldy old cardboard. The air is rank in here and he’s been to enough crime scenes to recognize the odor of more than just mold and grime. There’s a knot in his stomach when he crouches to peer into the room below.

The sight that greets him is enough to pull a horrified sound from deep inside him and Barry staggers a little as he phases down into the room, unable to tear his gaze away from what’s been done to his friend.

Manny is bound by the waist to an old padded chair, his head lolling against the cushion. His arms are tied to the arms of the chair, ropes tight around forearms that end far too abruptly. Where Manny’s hands should be are, instead, two ugly wads of bloody fabric that make Barry feel nauseated just to look at them. 

Manny’s eyes flutter open at Barry’s noisy intrusion, glassy and wet looking and standing out sharply against the gray pallor of his face. When he sees Barry standing there, Manny shows off a weak sort of smile and says, “you came,” in this ragged, exhausted way that, honestly, scares Barry half to death.

“Oh my god, Manny,” Barry says and his hands twitch uselessly for a second, utterly bowled over by the what he’s seeing. He has to actively shake himself out of it, stepping forward to free Manny and doing his best to ignore the tacky way his feet pull away from the mess on the floor around him.

He doesn’t even realize that Manny is staring at him, not while he makes short work of the ropes and not when he’s fretting about how to move Manny without injuring him further. Then Manny says, “Barry,” and Barry freezes, meeting the shocked expression on his friend’s face with wide eyes of his own. Nothing logical happens in his brain, no excuses or diversions - his mental accelerator has jammed and Manny’s just flat out caught him.

“ _Barry_?” Manny says again and Barry frowns because his mouth hasn’t actually moved this time. “Barry Allen? Are you serious, you’re the Flash and we waited outside that stupid police station all day?” 

“Aw, shit,” Barry breathes, his whole body sagging with realization, and he turns around to see the doorway entirely blocked by more than one of Manny’s familiar form. 

“Oh my god, this is hilarious,” says one of the clones, even though that’s probably about as far away from Barry’s description of this event as a word can possibly be. “Little Barry Allen is the Flash. I can totally tell, now you’re not doing that thing with your face. That’s adorable.” 

Barry doesn’t give him time to say anything else. Instead, he throws caution to the wind and grabs Manny under the arms, zipping out of the room in a blur that sends the clones in the doorway flying. He can’t go full speed with his injured friend but that doesn’t mean he can’t go fast.

As he moves, Barry can hear the slow motion sound of the others becoming aware of the disruption: deep, rolling cries of surprise that seem to come from too many directions all at once, a rhythm of sluggish clicking as machine guns prepare and then begin to unleash their payloads. He passes by what feels like an impossible number of Manny’s clones on the factory floor, some of whom seem to be looking right at him, like they expect him to be where he is even though he wouldn’t normally believe it possible at this speed. There are bullets sliding leisurely through the air ahead of him and Barry realizes with a jolt that they do expect him to be there. They’re linked and, it seems, they have more than one way to use that against him and Manny.

Either way, he fully expects to make it out, free and clear, right up until he feels a sharp, tearing burn above his left knee. The pain snags at him, costs him his footing, and he hears an agonized sound from Manny as the both of them go rolling right out the front door of the old plant and over the dry scrape of desert earth beyond. 

“Barry,” Caitlin’s voice sounds in his ear, frightened, but Barry just grabs Manny and stumbles back to his feet, his heartbeat a panicked, barely there thrum in his chest. He doesn’t look back or even take the time to speak to his team at the lab, just gathers Manny up again and grits his teeth and does his best to push through the hot stabs of pain that lance through his injured leg with every high speed step.

The trip back to S.T.A.R. Labs takes about three times longer than the trip out and Barry finishes it by wiping out spectacularly in the hallway outside the cortex, sliding to a stop with Manny in a jumble by the wall. The two of them lay there, gasping, as Barry tracks the sound of running feet.

“Oh my god!” Iris’s voice rings out, presumably at the sight of Manny, haggard and broken looking, and suddenly he’s being lifted away from Barry by Joe and Caitlin.

“The headset,” Barry says, voice tight with pain and Cisco hurries back to take it from him. It’s a miracle the thing isn’t broken, or maybe it will be, if it works. “I didn’t even get to try it.”

Iris helps Barry up and supports his weight, leading him toward Caitlin’s lab where Manny, apparently unconscious now, has been stretched out in the bed usually reserved for him. He looks pale, clammy, and Barry is afraid that he’s too late. That there’s no way Manny could actually lose the kind of blood that had been on the floor in that room and not die but soon the monitor next to the bed is beeping out a surprisingly steady rhythm and Caitlin’s expression turns pinched rather than afraid. 

“Barry, your leg… You’ve been shot,” Iris says, pulling Barry’s attention away from Manny and reminding him of his own injury. Sure enough, there is a nearly perfect hole in the leather stretched over his thigh, oozing slowly with blood.

“Yeah, I noticed that,” Barry answers, a touch sardonic, as he frowns down at the wound, hand hovering over but not actually touching the swollen muscle. “They were about as close to on top of me as most people ever get, anymore. I think it’s the same thing that let them track Manny. They knew I was going to be there before I was and it was almost enough to count.”

It’s a sobering thought. Iris thinks so, too, if the way her hand tightens on his shoulder is any indication. 

***

Once she’s confident he’s stable, Caitlin pulls herself away from Manny long enough to take the bullet out of Barry’s leg, so the wound won’t close and need to be reopened. Barry grits his teeth and stares at the ceiling while she works, brows drawn tight, and if his grip on Iris’s hand is a little too strong to be considered comfortable, she doesn’t let on.

“We have seriously got to figure out actual painkillers for you,” Caitlin says, apologetically, winding a bandage around Barry’s thigh once the bullet is gone. “I keep meaning to get back to that, I’ve just been so distracted lately by… everything.”

“It’s ok. We’re all pretty distracted by this crap, I think,” Barry says, because of course they are, what with Dr. Alchemy on the loose and Mob Rule starting shit. Like he could hold it against her being too distracted helping him to help him.

The look she shoots his way throws him. Just for a second, there’s something unreadable about her and then, just as quickly, it’s gone. She smiles, an exhausted smile that Barry finds himself searching a little more intently than he normally would. “Of course we are. It’s… all pretty crazy.”

When Barry looks back at Iris, she doesn’t seem to have noticed anything at all. She just shows him a tired smile and leans her head on his shoulder, face turned in against his sleeve as Caitlin moves away to change the dirty bandages Manny is still wearing. Barry doesn’t really want to look, either.

***

Barry’s still sitting in the same spot an hour later, alone this time, save for Manny. Manny already looks markedly better than he had when he’d been brought here, with color in his cheeks again and none of the puffy redness around his eyes but Barry can’t stop staring at the clean white bandages now covering the stumps where Manny’s hands used to be. Where they, apparently, should be growing back sometime soon. 

He’d looked - of course, he had - and now he’s having trouble not picturing what’s going on under those bandages as skin and bone slowly knit. He knows that he’s not the first person to sit in this very room, watching someone heal from horrific injuries at an entirely unnatural speed but he’s never been on this side of it. For all that people have specifically told him so, he’s never actually appreciated just how weird and frightening it could really be. He can’t quite shake the anxious feeling, like his brain isn’t ready to accept that Manny’s a meta now and he’s going to be whole even though they’d literally _cut his hands off_. Barry looks down at his own, unable to help a few second’s worth of morbid curiosity. 

“You look less than chipper,” HR points out from the doorway and Barry doesn’t even try this time. He looks at HR like he’s nuts. “Ha. Understatement. Sorry. Need anything?”

Barry shakes his head and looks back at Manny but doesn’t say anything, hoping against hope that HR will take the hint.

“This guy. Wow, what a story,” HR says and he looks back at Manny, too, crossing his arms over his chest. Barry knows what he means, he does, but he’s so not in the mood that he can’t even muster up his usual tolerance for their weird, extra-dimensional squatter.

“It’s not a, ‘story,’ HR,” he snipes. “It actually happened to him.”

“Aw now, Barry. You know what I mean.”

Which, of course, Barry can’t argue with. He just frowns and shrugs and doesn’t look at HR again.

HR doesn’t say anything else but he doesn’t leave, either, just pulls out that same pad and pen he seems to keep on him all the time and begins to write. Barry lets him. He’s still not in the mood for company, really, but he also feels kind of like a brat for snapping so he just slouches in the rolling chair and drops his head against the seat back.

“You know,” HR says, after a long moment of silence. Barry actively does not sigh in dismay. “I think, if I was going to try and write someone like this, the hardest part would be the balance of him. Thinks he’s an awful person, maybe is a little bit, but he certainly seems nice enough when you’re just talking to him. See, you know how we, as readers of course, would know he’s not actually an awful person?”

“... What?” Barry’s tone is begging but HR, as usual, sallies forth unperturbed.

“Awful people never think they’re awful. If he’d done all that stuff he told you about and it hadn’t bothered him, I’d think he was awful right alongside him, I bet.”

Barry scoffs a little, though he’s not entirely sure it’s about Manny this time. “So, because he feels bad he’s a good person.”

“See, now you’re simplifying it into nonsense,” HR says, waving at him. “Here, we’ll use you as an example cause I don’t actually know this guy. You mess up really, really big.”

“Oh my god,” Barry says.

“Let me finish!” HR waves at him again but he’s grinning a little bit. Barry has to wonder if this is some kind of act, if he knows exactly what he’s like and he’s just seeing how long they’ll let him keep it up. “I couldn’t mess up as big as you, if I _tried_ -.”

“Getting worse by the second, HR.”

“-Because I don’t have the capability to really screw up that badly. Like, the worst mistakes of my life don’t really branch out that far. They don’t hit many people because my capabilities are so limited. I’ve made some pretty bad calls in my day, though. Everybody does. You will never look a person in the eye who hasn’t done something that hurt someone else, whether they wanted to or not. We get rash or we do things to protect ourselves and sometimes those things hurt people. But you - and, of course, by extension, Manny - have such a depth of ability that your mistakes automatically have the potential to be bigger than other people’s. Lots of people are soldiers. Shoot, lots of people are soldiers for the wrong reasons but, without Manuel’s abilities, they simply couldn’t have ever done the kind of damage he did to the world. It’s like giving an angry toddler nuclear codes. You can’t really hate the toddler for blowing up the planet.”

Barry stares for a long moment. “I can’t tell if you’re defending us or calling us pissy babies who make bad decisions.”

HR laughs and Barry, honestly, can’t figure out whether or not to be annoyed by him anymore. “What I’m saying is, you guys both feel terrible about these things you’ve done but all you’ve done is make the same kinds of human mistakes that millions of people make every day. He chose revenge, people do that all the time. You wanted to save your family...Duh! It's only because of who you are that those decisions could even become the disasters they did. On the flip side, I’ve seen you save more people in a few months than some of the doctors I knew did their entire careers. Not through any fault of their own, of course. Your abilities not only make you capable of huge mistakes, they make you capable of really, _really_ cool stuff. And you want to do that cool stuff which I think is way better and more realistic than you being some impossible paragon of morality and good judgement. And I bet Manuel’s not actually a terrible person, all told. I mean, it sounds like he was angry and hurt and that he hurt a lot of people but I think that if he was really as bad as he said he was, he wouldn’t say he was. And he wouldn’t have come to you. The Flash. Who people say is nice. Just saying. Benefit of the doubt, you know, extended for his special circumstances.”

“Huh,” Barry says, still staring - albeit, a little more reflectively by now. “Apparently, how you would write Manny is actually kind of helpful to think about,” he allows.

HR shrugs, all easy amicability. “That’s why you call me the muse.”

Barry laughs. “No, we don't.”

“No, you dont,” HR agrees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Haha, so in the comics the whole Iris being kidnapped by Mob Rule is barely a footnote. It's literally just a quick thing that happens on the title page of one comic after being revealed on the final page of the previous comic. I mean, granted Barry is with Patty and there's a whole other subplot with Captain Cold that explodes after the Mob Rule arc that just wouldn't have fit at all into Arrowverse... That's why this has been so fun. There's just stuff I have to find a whole new way to do or stuff that didn't happen in the comics that absolutely _would_ happen here and it's been a great challenge. [Here](http://imgur.com/a/aPL88)


	5. The Whole Fam-Damily

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things get a little more complicated than Barry is really prepared for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok, so... I have something to admit. My whole system has been, post a chapter, spend a week editing the next one, post that, edit, and so on. So I was doing that and I found this great big stupid plothole that I just couldn't abide (I keep saying this adaptation is challenging!) and I was trying to fix it and then suddenly it's been a week and I've got a bigger chapter than any before with the end still a good bit of writing away. Six chapters. I'm sorry. :(

“You little shit,” is the first thing Manny says when he wakes up in the middle of having his vitals checked. Caitlin freezes, looking between Barry and Manny with wide eyes but Barry feels a swell of relief. “‘Oh, I’ve seen him before,’” Manny carries on, his high pitched impression of Barry’s voice thrown off just a bit by the thick, exhausted edge to his tone.

Barry laughs and Caitlin visibly relaxes. “Well, I mean… I have.”

“You are such an ass,” Manny says but he grins a little. Then he sobers and adds, “Thanks for getting me out of there.”

Barry just shrugs. “Yeah, man.”

Caitlin ends up looking between them again as they fall to silence, then she clears her throat and says, “I’d like to check your… Under the bandages.”

Manny looks amused by her hesitance but he holds up his arms anyway. Barry can’t help noticing the peculiar bulge pulling at the bandages and his nose wrinkles just a bit as he guesses at the cause. Manny confirms it, saying, “I actually am pretty ready to get these off.”

Cisco wanders in just in time to see what’s under the bandages and he lets out a startled shout that makes Caitlin jump. “Holy crap, it’s like Deadpool,” he says, looking mystified, and Manny lets out a loud, throaty laugh. “Sorry,” Cisco adds, showing Manny an owl-eyed look.

“No, it’s totally weird,” Manny says and Barry finds himself inclined to agree. What’s formed at the end of Manny’s arms aren’t quite hands yet, though they are beginning to verge on recognizable as such.

“I’ve actually been thinking about that,” Caitlin says, though she seems to be having trouble tearing her eyes away from Manny’s sort of hands. “Can uh… Mob Rule can do this too, right? Regenerate?” Manny nods and then Caitlin does too. “Right, so, that explains why they die the way they do, I think. Their cells are falling apart because there’s nothing to bind them together but they’re also regenerating at the same time. So their bodies have a sort of push-pull between degeneration and regeneration until the stress is eventually too much… I’m guessing.”

“Makes as much sense as anything,” Manny says, shrugging. “So, how does that help us?”

Caitlin looks taken aback. “It uh… Have we just tossed the idea of fixing their problem?”

Manny’s expression clouds over and he looks Barry’s way. “I don’t know. Have we?”

Barry doesn’t quite know what to say to that. The honest answer is that he’d sort of forgotten about that side of their problem when both Iris and Manny had been kidnapped. The whole ordeal with the severed hands and the terrifying rush through the old bottling plant had only exacerbated the issue. Honestly, Barry’s not sure what to think anymore. Fixing Mob Rule’s strange ailment has always factored into his plans but who would he really be saving? Kidnappers. Murderers. People who think there’s anything in the world worth torturing a man. Just hiding Manny away and letting them die off isn’t the same as killing them, right? He can’t force Manny, the only person apparently capable of helping them, to actually do it, after all.

“Have we,” Manny asks again, a little more insistent this time. By now Joe and Iris are hovering in the doorway and the tension is so thick Barry thinks he might be able to reach out and grab handfuls of it.

“I don’t know,” he finally says. “I’m honestly having trouble coming up with reasons to try.”

No one, not even Caitlin, seems to be able, or maybe inclined, to argue the point.

Everyone is still staring uncomfortably at one another when Wally’s voice comes echoing, loud and sing song, from the corridor. “Hey, hey, hey, I brought so many burritos, you guys.” Barry looks up in time to see him stroll into the cortex with plastic bags hanging off both arms and a big grin on his face. “I got paid yesterday so I got, like, four of-.” Wally stops abruptly at the doorway to the recovery room and stares openly at Manny from over Joe and Iris’s shoulders. “Hi,” he says, slowly.

Manny looks equally confused. “Hi,” he answers.

“Am I supposed to know who this guy- Oh, shit, what happened to your hands?”

“Excuse me?” Joe gives Wally a look that Barry remembers very well from his teenage years. 

“Well, I mean look at his hands,” Wally insists. “Are you ok, man?”

Manny huffs, hesitantly amused. “Been better,” he says.

No one seems to know what to say. They all just sort of gape at each other until Wally makes a vaguely disgusted noise and throws his hands up, take out bags swinging. “I swear, you guys are allergic to keeping people in the loop.”

“This is my old friend Manuel Lago,” Barry finally says and Wally’s eyes widen almost comically.

“Oh, the dead guy?”

Manny actually does laugh this time. “Sort of,” he says and Wally shakes his head.

“Life has been seriously _weird_ since I met you guys,” he laments.

They fill Wally in over a late lunch during which Manny eats even more than Barry before noticing that there’s something off. Barry raises his own eyebrows when Manny’s pinch together and he watches as Manny runs his forearm over the anti-telepathy headset he’s been wearing since they brought him back. 

“What the hell am I wearing,” he asks and Barry has to bite back a laugh at the surprised confusion emanating from his friend.

“Anti-telepathy headset,” he says and Manny’s confused expression only deepens. “We were hoping it would cut off Mob Rule’s link to you.”

“You just… had an anti-telepathy headset lying around?”

Cisco snorts. “Nah. We had this whole… thing. Before.” 

Barry spends a few seconds considering that there are things in their lives so weird that Cisco doesn’t want to open up about them to a man currently re-growing his hands, then says, “I’m just kind of amazed the thing didn’t break when they shot me. I wiped out hard.”

“Well,” Cisco says, like Barry’s kind of dumb, “last time you were wearing it you got thrown through a brick wall. Shit’s reinforced, Barry.”

“What even is life anymore,” Manny wants to know.

“Amen,” says Wally, raising his burrito in agreement. 

***

Any levity fades away pretty quickly when the panic button alarm goes off about half an hour later. The alert is coming from Dr. Elias’s phone, which Cisco tells him is somewhere in the Stagg building, so Barry speeds into his suit and leaves S.T.A.R. Labs in the direction of Stagg Industries. 

He uses the stairs this time and whooshes into Dr. Elias’s office to find a very different scene than the one he’d been expecting.

Dr. Elias is seated behind his desk, looking antsy and excited and, on the other side, sits just one of Manny’s clones, unmasked and apparently unarmed, looking at Barry like he expects to be attacked.

“What the… What,” is what Barry ends up saying.

“Flash!” Dr. Elias practically bounces from his seat. “This man is a member of the group who stole my gene re-coding device. He has the most incredible origin story I’ve ever heard in my life.”

“Yeah,” Barry says. “Yeah, I’ve heard it. What are you doing here?” He directs the last bit to the clone sitting in front of Dr. Elias’s desk.

The clone looks a little guilty under the weight of Dr. Elias’s questioning glance. He scrubs his hands over his knees and then pushes up to his feet, eyeing Barry nervously.

“I’m, uh… I’m 25. I saw you out at the camp earlier…” Here 25 stops to let out an awkward little chuckle. “Not that, I guess, you can really tell the difference.

“No, I remember you actually,” Barry says, peering at 25 through narrowed eyes. This guy had chided the now dead 15 for calling Iris a bitch. Barry finds himself just slightly more willing to listen than he had been before.

“Oh, ok. Well. Hi, again. I came here because… We need to speak to Manny. Like, pretty urgently.”

Barry can’t help but scoff. “I don’t know how much he feels like talking. His hands are still growing back,” he says, and, beside him, Dr. Elias sounds just a bit like he’s choking. 25 looks guilty all over again.

“Yeah, about that…” 25 trails off, has a pretty visible struggle as he searches for the words, and then finally bursts out with. “Man, wouldn’t you do anything to save your family?”

25 has no way of knowing just how close to home that question really hits but it takes Barry’s breath away for a second. “Yeah, I guess I would,” he answers, once he’s found his voice again. “But that doesn’t mean it would be the right thing to do or worth all the consequences.”

Even though the comm has been silent this whole time, it feels heavier all of a sudden.

The clone stares at him for a moment, then shrugs helplessly. “I don’t know what that means, man. We just need help. We’re dying and he’s the only one who can save us.”

Barry frowns at 25. “Why does that have to involve chopping pieces off him while he watches?” Dr. Elias makes a horrified sound and Barry gestures emphatically in his direction. “Yeah, exactly, see? That’s messed up.”

“What if we all die before we can find a way to fix it? We’ll just be… gone.”

That gives Barry pause. His first reaction is, ‘so?’ It only takes about half a second for him to feel appalled at himself for thinking it, though. He has no idea what it feels like to be grown from the severed body parts of a tortured man, to be only a few months old and physically mature at the same time, but it occurs to him that the number of people who do is small and getting smaller every day. He may have never been in this particular situation but he knows what it’s like to feel alone and misunderstood and he knows what he does every day to keep safe the people he considers his family.

“I don’t know what to do,” he finally says, as much to 25 as to the people listening over the comm.

“Uh, Barry?” Cisco’s voice snaps him out of the staring match he and 25 seem to have found themselves in. “Manny says he’ll talk to him.”

Barry turns away from Dr. Elias and 25, lowering his voice. “Really?”

“Yeah, really. Just now.”

Barry looks back at 25 who is watching him anxiously. It occurs to Barry that he must have come to Elias because Cisco’s headset is doing its job and they can’t locate him by their usual methods. That’s awesome and he will totally have to high five Cisco for thinking of it but if he brings 25 back to S.T.A.R. Labs to talk to Manny then it’ll have been for nothing.

“Where should we do this? We can’t bring 25 back to… our… place where we meet or the others will be able to find him.”

“Manny says Big Belly Burger,” Cisco answers after a moment. Barry laughs. 

“All right, I’ll see you there.” He turns fully back toward 25 and the doctor and nods at the clone. “Hey, you. Let’s go get lunch.” Then he grabs 25 by the arm and flashes them both out of Dr. Elias’s office before 25 has time to answer.

***

“If your friends show up here,” Barry warns once he and 25 are standing outside the nearest Big Belly Burger to Stagg Industries, “if they hurt any of these people? You can kiss our help goodbye. I don’t care what Manny says, we won’t help _him_ if that’s what it comes down to.”

25 looks at him with widened eyes but nods. “Yeah, no. We won’t do that. We kind of all agreed that it would be stupid to keep taking Manny, just for you to come get him back, when we could be trying to fix our problem.” Barry gives him a suspicious look and 25 shrugs. “I dunno, man, I’m serious.”

The only thing Barry can really do now that they’re here is give 25 the benefit of the doubt. If his and Manny’s circumstances can be considered, ‘special,’ then Mob Rule’s definitely can. It’s not as easy as he’d like, consenting to trust this guy, but Barry makes himself do it, crossing his arms and leaning against the stuccoed building to wait.

When Cisco pulls up in the van, Manny gets out in a set of oversized S.T.A.R. Labs sweats, the sleeves of which hang down far enough to cover his hands, anti-telepathy headset presumably left behind. Beside Barry, 25 goes kind of tense and Barry looks over to see him staring at Manny with a concerned expression that he can’t help but frown at. Manny’s certainly doing better now than he had been in their care.

Manny shows 25 a bit of side eye as he approaches and then passes by without a word, arms crossed over his chest. 25 looks about as close to a kicked puppy as someone with Manny’s stature probably ever could but follows after him and Barry, shaking his head, takes up the rear. 

When they step into the restaurant there is a moment kind of like in one of those old westerns where everyone goes completely still and silent the moment the doors have closed behind them. It occurs to Barry, too late, that everyone he’s here with knows who he is. He could’ve done this part without the suit. 

“Awkward,” Manny and 25 sing in unison. Manny glares at 25 who holds his hands up like he’s actually done something wrong. 

“You know, I thought you were here to talk to him,” Barry says once Cisco has joined the line at the counter and he, Manny, and 25 have taken seats at a table in the corner, “but you just seem kinda pissed off.”

“I am,” Manny answers, glowering, and 25 seems to deflate even further. “I can still talk. _After_ we eat something. That kid could not even try to afford enough burritos for me today.”

They end up waiting in silence, Barry doing his best not to notice the way everyone in the room is either staring or trying - and failing - not to look at all. He wishes there was some logical way to explain the Flash disappearing and being replaced by some random dude with exactly the same build before they even get their food.

When Cisco makes it over, he has a tray loaded down with burgers which he pushes to the center of the table before sitting back and folding his arms over his chest. Manny doesn’t waste any time, shaking back the sleeves of his sweatshirt to free up his hands so he can grab a burger. They’re still not quite fully formed, shiny and pink and missing fingernails, but they’re far enough along in their regrowth for Manny to feed himself properly. Barry looks away and grabs a burger for himself.

“Go on,” Cisco says, suddenly, and Barry looks up to see 25 staring mournfully at the pile of food. “I got a lot.” 25 doesn’t waste any time, either.

Between the three of them, it doesn’t take long before the burgers are gone. 25 doesn’t eat as much as Manny, presumably because just existing is a lot less demanding than trying to regrow parts of your body, or maybe because he still feels as awkward as he looks. Either way, Manny eats like a man starved and Barry, who Wally also couldn’t afford to feed on his best day, finishes most of the rest.

Cisco is shaking his head by the time the last empty box makes it onto the pile. “Why didn’t my abilities come with abs and being able to eat what the hell ever?”

“Well, I mean, you can travel between… dimensions…” Barry trails off, remembering an accidental jaunt to an Earth with no S.T.A.R. Labs and visions Cisco largely doesn’t seem to even want. “Yeah, man, I dunno. That sucks. Sort of. It’s less expensive.”

“Which really matters if you’re homeless,” 25 says, putting a bit of a dampener on things. Manny lets out a long suffering sigh.

“What are we supposed to be talking about,” he asks and 25 gives him a look that’s just a little lost.

“Helping us?”

“ _How_? I’m not letting you… I’m not… We’re not making more of you. I’m not doing that again.”

“Ok, fine,” 25 says, nodding so quickly that Barry supposes he’s been expecting this condition. “Dr. Elias said he would help us.” He pauses, quirks his eyebrows at Barry. “Granted, that was before your buddy told him we were sicko sadists who cut people’s hands off for kicks.”

“I did not say it like that,” Barry scoffs.

“There aren’t all that many nice ways to say it,” 25 fires back.

“Well, that’s cause it’s not a _nice_ thing to do!”

“Guys, guys,” Manny says, looking between Barry and 25 like maybe they’re both a little crazy. “So, I know I picked this place cause it’s public but _we are in public_.” Once he seems satisfied that the two of them are done, Manny sighs and adds, “I still don’t know why I’m supposed to even _want_ to help you.”

25 just stares at him for a moment, like it should be obvious. Then he says, “Cause we’ll die if you don’t.” Manny just lets out a non-committal huff and frowns out the window and 25 looks at him even harder. “You do want to help us. I can feel it that you do, you know.”

“I shouldn’t,” Manny answers, laughing bitterly. “You held me prisoner. You tortured me.”

“Cause we wanted to survive,” 25 answers, cutting the volume of his answer in half when Cisco waves at him. “It’s not like we just said, ‘hey, let’s chop this dude up for kicks!’ It’s not like we think it’s an awesome thing to do, Manny. You know that. You _have_ to.” 25 stops, lets out a laugh of his own that’s every bit as bitter as Manny’s. “That self-loathing you feel? That’s not all you, buddy.”

That seems to strike a chord in Manny, if the expression on his face - like 25 has reached across the table and slapped him - is anything to go by. “I can’t do that,” he says but he turns to Barry before he’s even finished speaking. “I don’t feel them or I wouldn’t have-.”

“You’re either lying or you think you’re crazier than you probably are,” 25 interrupts. “You may not jump when I stub my toe but I know that you can feel what we’re feeling cause I’ve seen it. I’ve seen you smiling when nobody but us had any reason to be happy and I’ve felt you hating yourself more and more the more we hated ourselves even though you weren’t the one doing anything wrong.” When Manny doesn’t answer, just stares at him with an expression of low level terror on his face, 25 adds, “and I can feel it all clicking into place right now. How much better did you feel when we couldn’t track you, right?”

“I shouldn’t,” Manny insists after a weighty pause but his voice isn’t quite so hard anymore. 25 lets out a gusty sigh.

“Ok, remember that book Barry made you read in college? And you were like, ‘oh, this is a kid’s book,’ but it wasn’t?” Manny blushes a bit and 25 turns to Barry, a hint of a grin on his face. “He read the whole series, by the way. He just didn’t tell you cause he’d made such a stink about the first one and the themes kind of made him uncomfortable... Anyway, that guy, Ender, said basically that once you understand someone the way they understand themselves, you can’t help but love them. That’s us, man. Like, all of us.”

“I don’t love you,” Manny says, witheringly.

“But you don’t hate us, either. Not the way you want to. You can’t. And you kinda have to hate someone to just let them die when you could stop it, right?” 25’s expression clouds just a bit and he adds, “16, 17 and 18 were dead when I left. 19 and 20 are kind of losing their shit. I dunno if you can feel that now that you’ve stopped… doing whatever you were doing before.”

Manny seems to be trying but, after a minute, he shakes his head. 25 shrugs.

“They’re miles away, I guess…” He drops his gaze and directs his next question toward the table. “Will you help us? Please? We have everything we need now, except you.”

Barry and Cisco may not share a psychic link with each other but Barry knows him well enough by now to know the look on his face, that he finds Mob Rule’s situation just as pitiful as Barry does. It doesn’t necessarily excuse their actions but it does go a long way toward making them something Barry can sympathize with on some level. Despite his earlier threats, Barry wants Manny to say, ‘yes.’ He wants to gather Dr. Elias and Caitlin and put their brilliant minds to work on this. He wouldn’t have believed it this morning and he’s not going to push Manny either way but he does.

So when Manny finally lets out a tension filled breath, sagging in the cheap plastic seat and nodding his head, Barry wastes no time in catching the attention of the team still in the cortex.

“We’re going to be bringing 25 back to S.T.A.R. Labs,” he says when Iris answers, voice low, meeting 25’s excited gaze as he speaks. He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t just a little nervous to be inviting a group like Mob Rule into the place he considers a sanctum but maybe it’s worth it. Maybe, if there’s even a chance for these guys to move beyond the barbarism they’d been born into, they need this trust from all of them. Maybe. “Tell Joe to alert the task force,” he adds, just in case.

***

“You know, I’m trusting you a lot, right now,” Barry says to 25, later, when they’re standing in front of the glass doors to S.T.A.R. Labs. “Half the important stuff in my life happens in this place, these days. So… Just saying. If you’re thinking of pulling anything, maybe... don’t.”

“Man, I probably have a few hours left, maybe a day, if I'm really lucky. I’m not pulling anything. I just want somebody to help us.” 25’s voice is about as matter of fact as it can get but he’s enough like Manny for Barry to tell how bothered he really is. How understandably bothered, Barry has to admit. He’s not sure he could be this calm facing down the prospect of hours left to live. It’s one thing to charge into danger and - at least it’s always seemed - something entirely different to spend real time facing down an inevitability that can’t be fought. He hasn’t considered it yet but it’s a very real possibility that, whatever they pull off here, 25 won’t live to see his efforts do any good. Barry doesn’t really know what to say to that so he just nods and pushes open the glass door.

They make it into the cortex to find Wally and Joe in a full on familial dispute that Barry doesn’t have to work too hard to figure out is about Wally’s presence at S.T.A.R. Labs. 

“Why aren’t you trying to chase Iris off,” Wally wants to know.

“I did,” Joe answers, sounding every inch the exhausted father. “It didn't work. Now I'm trying it with you. Are you gonna insist on being a giant pain in my ass, too? Cause things are about to get a lot crazier than you really need to be here for.”

“Maybe things going crazy here is how I get my powers,” Wally suggests but Joe has already laid eyes on Barry and 25, both hovering a little awkwardly in the doorway.

“Hopefully things won’t get crazy at all,” 25 says to fill the ensuing silence.

“Go home. _Please_.” Joe says, pointing his finger at Wally. Wally sighs melodramatically and Barry has to step aside as he storms out of the cortex, silently fuming. 

“... So this is 25,” Barry says, sensing that it’s his turn to try and kickstart a conversation. “Cisco’s coming back with Manny in the van but…” Barry trails back off, shrugging rather than admitting in front of the man, himself, that he hadn’t trusted 25 alone with his friends. It certainly won’t make Joe feel any better, either. “Here we are.” He gestures toward 25 as if presenting him to an audience.

Joe just gives 25 a look full of cool scrutiny. “I’m going to assume, for your sake, that you weren’t involved with taking my daughter from her home this morning,” he says and 25 looks, honestly, kind of terrified. He shakes his head.

“No sir, I… Ha. I was supposed to… get Barry.” 25 turns his wide eyed look on Barry, now. “We were gonna be cool about it but everybody thought it was the best idea.”

“So, the only reason you didn’t abduct one of my kids this morning is because you had some bad luck,” Joe says and Barry almost wants to laugh. He holds onto it because Joe and 25 look about as serious as they can get. “That’s what you want to let me know.”

“I- I… I want to let you know that I have only the best intentions for your family and mine.”

“Ok,” Joe sighs. He points at Barry. “Come talk to me,” he says, and they step into Caitlin’s lab where they can keep an eye on 25 while still maintaining a bit of privacy. “You realize you just invited a whole bunch of crazy clones into S.T.A.R. Labs, right? That one just admitted to trying to abduct you this morning.”

“Yeah, ok but the only other person they found to help them works at Stagg Industries which is actually functioning as an actual workplace right now with hundreds of people who are in and out all the time.”

Joe raises an eyebrow at him. “Point,” he says, not looking entirely happy about it.

“And,” Barry says, since this is working in his favor, “they already know who I am. Even if they don’t know where the Flash goes during his off time, they do know where I work and where Iris lives. If we’re working with them they have less of a reason to use that knowledge against us.”

“Ok, fine,” Joe says and Barry feels just smug enough that Joe notices and adds, “Don’t give me that smug look. You’re right but that doesn’t mean this is a good idea.”

“It’s the right thing to do, Joe,” Barry says, quietly, because that’s what this is about, he thinks.

Joe confirms it, saying, “Really? These guys are guilty of, just today, kidnapping, torture, and murder.”

“Not all of them,” Barry says, even though he’s not entirely sure when he ended up on the defensive for Mob Rule. “In fact, the one that shot that doctor is dead. I watched him die and we don’t know of anyone else that they’ve hurt. … Except for Manny but, I mean, they have some pretty special circumstances that we should consider before we just condemn them all.” 

“Ok, so what about after all this is over? You’ve got somewhere over 50 guys who all look just alike, are accessories to federal crimes, and have no citizenship to any nation. What’s the plan then, Bear?”

Barry stalls out. This one he doesn’t have an answer for. To be honest, it only serves to further highlight the vast differences between Mob Rule and anyone else Barry has ever known. These guys are less than a year old. There are no homes or families or jobs for them to get back to. He doesn’t know how to explain to Joe how sorry he feels for them, or how incomprehensible and disturbing he finds their lives. So he shrugs and Joe lets out another weary sigh. 

“I’ve got some guys on the way and the rest on alert. We can… figure out what to do once we know these guys aren’t all going to drop dead on us.” 

Barry nods and, as he watches Joe’s retreating back, feels the weight of all his reservations settling a little more heavily on his shoulders. 

***

Caitlin has even more problems for him. 

Apparently the gene re-coder is located in one of the more heavily damaged areas of S.T.A.R. Labs, for one thing. He picks his way carefully through the rubble, followed closely by Caitlin, Cisco, Manny and 25 until they’ve reached a piece of equipment that has clearly seen better days. 

“Honestly, this isn’t really very well suited to our needs,” Caitlin points out. She presses a button on a panel and a few lights turn on but he guesses from her frown that whatever she is expecting to happen, isn’t. “I can treat one of you at a time with this and the process takes a full day. Normally we’d space it out but...”

“I’m not even sure I have that long,” 25 says, forlorn.

Caitlin looks a little bit sad, herself, but the haunted look on her face is directed toward the beaten gene re-coder. “What I suggest is that we call in Dr. Elias with his device. It does the same job with a controlled EMP, according to the press release. I don’t think that he ever expected to be treating a group this size but it’s more likely to help more of you faster than this old thing is.”

“He said he’d help,” 25 answers, still frowning up at the machine. “Hopefully he hasn’t changed his mind.”

“I’ll check,” Barry says and, after making sure that Joe’s men have arrived, he makes the relatively short trip between S.T.A.R. Labs and Stagg Industries.

When Barry speeds into the doctor’s office this time, Elias, tense and anxious looking, startles so badly that he basically tosses a manila folder into the air and showers himself with the papers inside. Barry stares.

“Sorry,” he says and Dr. Elias lets out his breath in one great whoosh, leaning heavily on his desk. 

“I was certain you were going to be bringing the police with you when you came back,” Dr. Elias says, voice shaky, and Barry shows him a confused sort of smile.

“Why?”

“Aiding and abetting a… torturer, I don’t know,” Elias answers, throwing his hands up and then dropping to collect his papers. Barry gathers the scattered mess into a neat stack by the time Elias has picked up his first sheet. He grins a little as he takes the papers from Barry, apparently starting to feel more himself now that he knows the Flash doesn’t want him arrested. “Thank you,” he says and Barry shrugs.

“Are you feeling thankful enough to go somewhere with me? We’re going to help those guys but we need you and your device to do it.”

Dr. Elias gives Barry a considering look. “You didn't seem too keen on helping them earlier,” he says. “What changed?”

Barry laughs a little, stalling, shrugs his shoulders and looks at the floor. “I uh… Maybe I was looking at the whole thing as a little too black and white,” he admits. “They’re in a situation I can’t even really comprehend, if I’m being honest.”

Dr. Elias nods. “It occurred to me, just now, that the man who came to see me today is younger than my two year old daughter.”

“Huh,” Barry answers, letting that sink in. He hasn’t really thought about it that way either, yet. Granted, Elias’s two year old daughter doesn’t have combat experience or a lifetime of memories belonging to another person, a near majority of which involves a lot of complicated revenge plots and unfounded hatred and, eventually, horrific torture. Barry finds himself frowning at his train of thought. On a moral level, helping Mob Rule feels like the only real option. On a rational one, he finds himself more conflicted every time he really thinks about what he’s doing. “I have to admit, this situation is all kinda over my head. If you want to help, we could really use you but I can understand if you don’t.”

“No, I do want to help,” Dr. Elias says, quickly hurrying over to his desk and pulling out a box that he opens to reveal the gene re-coder. “This is an absolutely bizarre case and I’d be crazy to turn down the chance to have a real look at it.” Elias pauses, then smiles hesitantly, closing the box and tucking it under his arm. “Besides, I find myself hoping I’ll get to see what superspeed feels like.”

Barry can’t help but grin. “I think that can be arranged,” he says, then whisks the doctor out of Stagg Industries before he can finish the giddy noise he’s making.

“Oh my- Oh, wow,” Elias says once they’re standing in the cortex together. He looks both thrilled and kind of like he’s about to throw up. “That was incredible! I think I’m going to… ugh, I’m going to be ill but that-.” He’s cut off by an ominous burp and so Barry ushers him to the nearest waste bin before he can make a mess all over the floor.

“I would like to submit this right here as exhibit A in the case of why Cisco would rather take his car,” Cisco says and Barry looks up to see him standing in the doorway with a few heavy loops of cable over his shoulder.

“I think it might have been worth it,” Elias answers, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. He looks at Cisco and then does a doubletake. “You’re the young man from the symposium,” he says, clearly surprised. He looks up and then turns a full circle, jaw slack, as he takes in the gleaming cortex. “My goodness, am I in S.T.A.R. Labs?”

Barry makes a mental note to thank HR for his nearly compulsive cleaning habits. It’s kind of annoying to never know where anything is but it’s pretty worth it now that the cortex is sleek and spotless and Elias is amazed by it. “Yup. They help me help everybody else.”

“One would never expect this looking at the place from the outside,” Dr. Elias says and Cisco snorts.

“Well,” he says, flashing his too big fake smile. “Shows how much _one_ knows, right?”

“Cisco,” Barry says and Cisco preempts any further scolding by holding his hands up in surrender.

“I’m afraid I accidentally insulted this place the only other time we’ve met,” Elias says, once Cisco has disappeared down the corridor, and Barry shrugs, offers Elias his best reassuring smile.

“He’ll be all right.”

Cisco is all right, too, especially once Elias reveals that his device had never been intended for such a large group and will have to be modified and then he’s even more all right when it turns out that some part of it had been damaged in the fall to the sewers. 

“We can open it up in my lab,” he offers, immediately and Elias looks a little surprised by his change of attitude. Cisco notices. “What? You made this giant thing,” he waves at the S.T.A.R. Labs gene re-coder, “tiny. I want to see how that works. Not to… Not to steal.”

Dr. Elias appears to be considering it. “It’s a prototype,” he says, the slightest petulant edge to his voice.

Before a decision can be reached, Joe’s voice comes over the comm, an edge to it that immediately puts Barry on alert. “Hey, maybe you guys can start working your way back to the cortex. We got company.”

A lot of company, it turns out. 72 guys, all decked out in black fatigues but, apparently, unarmed. Stepping out of the glass doors of S.T.A.R. Labs, Barry finds himself looking into 72 familiar identical faces. He’s not sure how he knows that it’s 25 standing at the fore of the group but he turns out to be right.

“Well, it looks like everybody decided to come,” 25 says, looking a bit sheepish. “I think we’re all a little eager to get going on this.”

Barry looks back at his friends, taking in the shocked looks on their faces. It’s easy to forget that, even though they hear everything, they don’t get to see as much of it. Mob Rule, even unarmed, is a pretty imposing sight and it looks like every last one of them is standing out in front of S.T.A.R. Labs in what is still, somehow, broad daylight.

This is turning into the single longest day of Barry’s life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, normally I put a screenshot of a relevant panel here but by this point, my story is so far diverged from the New 52 story that there isn't anything relevant until the next (whoops) chapter. Instead, have this one of Elias making Barry run on the same treadmill that Barry has been running on since like episode 2 and Barry being dubious about it. [Here](http://imgur.com/a/xQ9y7). And then, as a bonus, take this one of Barry, waking up after being shot in the head cause he's all 'ooo' about his ability to think in superspeed, which he does without so much trouble in like... episode 4? The one with Kyle Nimbus. [Here](http://imgur.com/a/QhdXD). See? Barry's in a very different place in this fic. And people say the show's supporting cast makes him look weak. Come on. Getting shot in the head when you go after the bad guys AS YOUR NON-SUPER ALTER EGO is what's weak, ok? Thinking people will be ok with you just pretending to drown so you can turn into your super self is also pretty silly and poorly thought out, ergo: weak.
> 
> But I digress.


	6. Blast From the Past and Other Not So Nice Things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> S.T.A.R. Labs gets ready to help Mob Rule. Barry finds more reasons to be conflicted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Omg, y'all, this is the end. O.O!

Barry doesn’t remember S.T.A.R. Labs ever being this tense before, not back when he’d been first coming to suspect that Harrison Wells was the Man in Yellow or even when everyone had hated him after Flashpoint. It’s not helped at all when two members of Mob Rule get into an argument, and then an actual fist fight, over which Star Wars episode Manny likes best. Even though 25 and a few of the other clones - replicants, Dr. Elias keeps insisting - help to break the fight up, Barry overhears Joe calling in the rest of the task force shortly after things have quieted down again. It doesn’t take long for him to find a reason to be grateful for it.

The first thought Barry’s brain supplies when he sees the two figures in the hall is that he’d been wrong and Iris and Manny, happily reunited, are ready to explore things they hadn’t been in college. That only lasts about a nanosecond, though, because Iris looks frustrated and Manny is not wearing the S.T.A.R. Labs sweats that Manny is actually wearing right now.

“I said back _up_ ,” Iris says, shoving hard enough at the clone who is trying to crowd her against the wall that he is forced back a few steps and then, suddenly, Barry is standing where he had been and he is on the floor several feet away.

“What the fuck, man,” the clone wants to know, glaring at Barry and then Iris from the floor. He shows her an accusing frown as he gets to his feet. “Since when do you not want this?”

“Excuse me,” Iris says and then she turns to look at Barry as if to confirm that she’s heard the clone correctly.

The clone makes a face like he thinks Iris is the one who is nuts. “Hey, we all have Manny’s memories, ok? I remember you trying to get him to go out with you.”

Iris’s mouth opens and then closes again. She makes a stilted gesture with her hands, then throws them up and turns around. “Ok, no,” she says, and disappears into the cortex.

“What the hell,” the clone demands.

Barry is a little amazed by how genuinely confused the clone looks but it definitely takes up a lot less mental space than his desire to throw lightning at him. “Don’t think so hard about it, man,” he says, his tone sharp and a little derisive. “It doesn’t matter why. She said no.” Barry stares hard at the clone until he nods and then lets out a tension filled breath. This is one of the men they’re trying to save. “That goes for anybody else, too. You remember that, all right?” 

His first stop, after that, is Joe who is by now off the phone and looking curiously across the room at Iris who is glaring at her own phone and typing forcefully, clearly annoyed. “Ok, you were right,” Barry says, before he can think his way out of his anger toward the clone in the hallway. “Buddy system, and we need to have at least one guy with a boot in every room that we’re using, or more, as many as we can manage, and maybe an escort for people who need to go to other areas…”

Joe catches on immediately and his expression becomes rather ominous. “Did one of them do something to her,” he demands, loud enough that Iris looks up.

“Not for lack of tr-,” Barry starts but Iris cuts him off.

“I’m fine,” she says and shoots Barry a dirty look. “Someone just needs to learn a few things about boundaries.”

“I am so sorry,” says another of Manny’s clones and Barry guesses from his demeanor that this is 25 again. He looks stricken. “It didn’t occur to any of us that was something we even needed to talk about. We don’t get out much.” He looks nervously from Iris to Joe and then adds, “I’ll uh… Ha, I think everybody felt that bodyslam but I’ll make sure everybody understands the reason for it,” and then he literally runs out of the room.

***

Barry finds Manny in Cisco’s lab, watching what looks like a mildly heated debate between Cisco and Dr. Elias. Manny grins a little when he spots Barry and, beside him, Iris and inclines his chin. “Listening to these two talk is a bit of a trip,” he says in an undertone, apparently not wanting to disrupt the bickering scientists.

“Ok, but are you a geneticist or an engineer,” Cisco is saying and Dr. Elias lets out this laugh that’s as smug as Barry’s heard him yet. 

“Both,” he says and Cisco scowls at the loss of his ammunition. “Very barely but, still, both.”

“Both,” Cisco scoffs but he does move closer to Barry, Iris, and Manny than to Elias while the doctor opens his device. 

“How you holding up, Cisco,” Barry asks once Cisco has dropped into a chair nearby, and his friend scrubs his hands over his face, letting out a muffled groan. “That good, huh?”

“I keep running into tiny tech and not getting to know how it works,” Cisco answers. “Plus, two of those guys were in here just a second ago asking me about _Mexico_. I’m not even from Mexico, Barry.”

“Yeah,” Barry says, chagrined. “Yeah, they’re a little bit more than I’d really been expecting.”

“As in, there are more of them or they’re more complicated?”

“Both,” Iris answers for him and Barry nods because she’s not wrong.

As if summoned, more of them show up at just that moment with what turn out to be more complications.

“Hey, it’s me, 25,” says the leader of a group of about six of Manny’s clones and Barry feels marginally less apprehensive about the purpose of their visit. Only marginally, though, because 25 starts introducing him to his companions - 30, 33, 36, 41, 42, and 45 - and reassuring everyone they’re they’re all really level headed and that he’s really grateful to everyone for all the help they’d given even when they had no good reason to. “We got everyone into the lobby to talk about the thing with Iris and why it was fucked up and I’m really sorry he did that, Iris,” 25 says, a little too fast and a little too tight for Barry not to notice that something’s wrong with him.

“You ok, man,” Barry asks and he realizes, when 25 looks his way, just how pale he suddenly is. 

“Yeah. Yeah, no, I’m-,” 25 starts but, before he can get any further than that, his eyes have rolled back and Barry darts forward without stopping to think about it, catching 25 before he can hit the tiled floor.

For a moment, the only movement in the room is Dr. Elias turning to join everyone else in gaping at Barry and 25, then Barry lowers the clone to the floor and stumbles back away from him.

It wouldn’t be honest to say that he’d actually managed to like 25 in the few hours that he’s known him but it feels like he’s taken a punch to the gut anyway. Manny looks like he feels about the same way when Barry meets his eyes and he isn’t really all that surprised when Manny pushes off the counter he’d been leaning against and leaves the room without a word.

“Cisco,” Dr. Elias says into the silence that follows, his quiet voice startling Cisco and dragging his gaze away from the dead man on the floor. “Please… I believe I’ll need help with this, after all.”

***

When an hour passes by with nothing but nearly incomprehensible engineering speak coming from Cisco and Elias, Barry takes Iris by the hand and pulls her with him out of Cisco’s lab. 

“Just need to move,” he says, by way of explanation, once they’re alone and Iris nods.

“I see. And you needed a buddy.” 

“Exactly.” Barry manages a smile for her, even if it feels a little forced, and she gives his hand a squeeze, allows herself to be led in silence. 

They end up back in the broken room with the S.T.A.R. Labs gene re-coder and Barry drops his head back to look at the stars beyond the shattered roof. There’s something calming about them, even here in the city where most of them are hidden behind light pollution, and that’s something that Barry desperately needs right now. Whatever Cisco and Elias are doing, it’s taking too long, giving Barry too much time to dwell on all the possible outcomes of the decision they’ve made - _he’s_ made - and there aren’t all that many of them that he likes.

“You ok,” Iris wants to know, moving up beside him and dropping her head back to look out through the same hole in the roof that Barry is.

Barry lets out a humorless little laugh. Ok is something he very definitely isn’t but the real rub is that, whatever happens here, it’s going to be on him and he’s not nearly confident enough in Mob Rule to feel comfortable with that.

“I just… I feel like I’m messing up,” he admits, finally, “but I don’t know what other decisions I should be making. I mean… it would be wrong to just let these guys die because some of them did some messed up stuff.”

Iris nods immediately and, if nothing else, that makes him feel a little better. “I think you’re on the right track at least. It really is important to remember that these guys are individuals, that they can’t all be bad people. Just… don’t go so far in the other direction that you forget… they can’t all be _good_ people, either. They shouldn’t get a free pass to be bad people just because we’re trying to remember that they can be good people, too.”

It’s one of those things that Barry knows, on an academic level, to be true but that doesn’t mean Iris isn’t right. In fact, she probably is right. He’s letting himself forget that. Sure, they aren’t all 15 or the clone who had threatened Barry and Iris’s lives in the hallway that morning but they aren’t all 25 either.

“Thanks, Iris,” is all he says. Having a little clarity of thought is nice, even if he still feels nervous about exactly what is supposed to happen after all this is over. Iris doesn’t answer, just links arms with him and drags him over toward a bench where they can sit and see the sky through the broken roof. Maybe, between the stars and Iris, Barry can actually make it through this excruciating wait with his sanity intact.

***

“So, here’s where we finally are,” Dr. Elias says, that night around 2 am, entering the cortex with Cisco and Caitlin behind him. All three of them look wired and excited and not remotely as exhausted as Barry feels, sitting in Cisco’s usual seat beside a sleeping Iris who has only just, within the last few minutes, promised him she wasn’t going to sleep. Barry reaches out to shake her awake and Elias waits until she’s up and rubbing her eyes before carrying on. “Some soldering or another has come loose in my device. I designed it to receive templates through a microSD slot, you know, something accessible that wouldn’t require the patient be hooked up to the device itself or even on the same continent. It’s not working. Cisco and I have each been over the guts of it more than once, to no avail. Now, we could have kept searching, which might have taken all night, or we could rig it up to the machine already in S.T.A.R. Labs. It required a bit of maintenance and a bit of creativity but that’s what we’ve done. Manuel will provide the template and my device will supply the pulse that delivers it to the rest of the group.”

Something about it nags at Barry but it’s nothing that he can really put his foot on. It sounds like as solid a plan as they’re going to get and he’s been listening to bodies hit the floor what feels like all night. They aren’t just dying, they’re going left and right. He has no idea if the man who’d harassed Iris is still alive, or how many of 25’s select group is still left and it’s honestly wearing him out. He’s ready to move forward on this and he knows everyone else is too.

“Let’s do this,” he says pushing up to his feet.

Once Mob Rule knows what’s going on, it doesn’t take long to get them crowded in a circle around Dr. Elias’s rigged up device. Cisco ushers everyone else into a small room off the main one, with a window taking up half of one wall and a messy computer station that looks like it was set up in a hurry. Manny is in here, looking just a bit jittery as he provides Caitlin with a blood sample. 

“You all right there, man,” Barry wants to know and Manny gives a jerky nod, a smile that it looks like he’s trying to mean it.

“I’m fine, it’s them. Half of them are excited and half of them are terrified. Roughly. It’s not quite so crazy now I know it’s them.”

The more time that passes, the more antsy he seems to get. It only adds to the overall tension everyone seems to be feeling at this moment. They’re about to do their best to save the lives of a bunch of superpowered guys who may or may not be in possession of any basic human decency and Barry wishes more than anything else in this moment that he could feel certain of it. 

He doesn’t. 

Finally, Caitlin activates the microphone. “Be ready, guys,” she says, and Manny’s clones all look up at the sound of her voice. “Please remember this is, technically, a trial run of a new device. Don’t be discouraged if it doesn’t necessarily work the first time.” She gets a few thumbs up in answer and a sea of bobbing heads so she turns to look at the team gathered around her. “Ready guys,” she repeats and pushes a button that is appropriately large and red.

At first, it seems like nothing has happened. The clones in the outer room look like they’re not sure what to do and Dr. Elias’s expression is confused as well. “We should have seen a flash of green,” he says, when he catches Barry’s questioning look. “I wanted it to be clear when the machine had-.” He cuts off suddenly, and Barry follows his confused expression to the device in the middle of the crowd of clones.

The device has a wavering green corona that Barry assumes, from the doctor’s reaction, shouldn’t be there. Mob Rule is staring, some having moved closer, others nervously maintaining their positions for what they expect to be a life saving treatment.

“No,” Dr. Elias says, “No, no, no, this hasn’t worked, Flash, it’s…”

“EMP,” Cisco cuts in, sounding panicked. “It’s about to put out a huge pulse, you’ve got to redirect it or we could shut down half of Central City. And that’s if we’re lucky.”

“Are you positive it’s going to-,” Manny starts but Elias and Cisco cut him off with a pair of tension filled yeses. Barry can see the conflict in his eyes, his desire to save the men in the other room, but he can’t actually spend any time on it when Cisco hustles him toward the door.

“Vortex,” he half shouts, pushing Barry out and closing the door behind him. So that’s what Barry does. 

There’s barely any room to run between Mob Rule but also not enough time to move them all, not if Barry’s going by the pure fear emanating from Elias and Cisco, so he phases through the crowd of them and begins to run a tight, impossibly fast circle around the device, half watching as the green corona begins to swell.

It doesn’t take long even in speedster time for the pulse to go off, filling the vortex Barry has created and shooting out through the damaged roof. Barry is able to look just long enough to see the energy disappear in a flash of light but he doesn’t have that much time to consider where it’s gone. A sudden dull roar overtakes his senses and he begins to slow just in time to find himself knocked off his feet, mid run, by a powerful wave of concussive force. 

The blast is enough to knock Barry right across the room and into the window that he’d been watching all this through only seconds ago. There’s a loud splintering crack but, instead of actually breaking through, Barry just drops to the floor in a bruised heap, his ears ringing loud enough to drown anything else out. He can see but not hear as rubble showers the already shattered room, showers the bodies laid out around the smoking remains of the gene re-coder like trees hit by a pyroclastic flow. He’s not sure if some of them are actually moving sluggishly or if that’s just the nausea inducing waver in his vision. It looks like a horror show, all charred flesh and blank brown eyes but Barry can’t make himself look away.

Then the macabre sight is blocked out by Iris and even though he can see her mouth moving, see her forming the words, ‘Barry,’ and, ‘are you ok,’ over and over again, it sounds like she’s speaking to him through glass. He vaguely registers Caitlin and Dr. Elias running past them, presumably toward the pile of dying men and corpses they’ve spent all day working to create. The thought stabs at Barry and the weight of it, the weight of nearly sixty dead men, together with the stress of this impossibly long day and the burning ache radiating through his body, is enough to force a choked sob out of him.

He feels Iris’s hand on his face and he meets her eyes, shining with tears. Her mouth is still moving but this time Barry sees that she’s offering reassurance instead of asking for it, “It’s ok, Barry,” she’s saying.

There’s not a cell in his body that believes her.

***

Mob Rule leaves S.T.A.R. Labs in body bags, more than Barry’s ever seen in one place, right as the sun begins to rise behind the city skyline. Barry, still fully suited up, watches the procession of corpses with a dull cold feeling sitting deep in his gut. Those who hadn’t been killed by the initial explosion had either been lost to falling concrete or succumbed to their injuries later. Somehow, literally every single one of them is dead.

“You take this very personally, don’t you?” Dr. Elias’s voice startles Barry out of his dismal train of thought. His expression is sad and a little sympathetic and Barry doesn’t really know how to answer him.

“Every one of these body bags has someone in it who trusted us to help them,” he finally says, though he finds that he sounds more worn out than matter of fact. “How can I not take that personally?” 

The sympathy in Elias’s expression only deepens. “I wish it had worked too,” he says and then he moves away from Barry to talk to Joe.

“Their cells were fighting every moment to stay alive,” Caitlin is explaining to Manny when Barry approaches, feeling more hesitant to draw his old friend’s attention than he can really explain. Caitlin is bearing it well but Barry knows her well enough to see the exhaustion she’s trying not to show, to know that this failure has devastated her, too. “It’s entirely possible that the blast was just too much stress even for those who were in a better position to survive.”

Manny just shakes his head before fixing Barry with a stare that feels a little too blank for it to be anything but forced. “How did you survive that,” he asks, his voice just as dull as the look in his eyes. “You were closer to the blast than any of them.”

“I, uh,” Barry starts but he doesn’t really know how to answer Manny’s question. He’s not sure why he’s here, on the mend, and they’re being carted away to overwhelm the coroner’s office.

“I think it’s because you were running,” Caitlin says when she realizes that Barry doesn’t have anything. Barry raises his eyebrows at her, shrugs a little helplessly, and she elaborates. “I’ve seen you take more damage from someone’s bare fist than you usually take when you crash into solid objects at hundreds of miles an hour. ‘Padding,’ or not, that doesn’t make sense. Something about being tapped into the Speed Force protects you.”

Manny doesn’t appear to be listening by the time she’s finished. He’s just staring kind of blankly at the ground and Barry watches him, trying not to wonder what it must be like to feel, telepathically, 58 people all dying, practically at the same time.

“I’m really sorry,” he finally says. “I know this can’t be-.”

“I have to go,” Manny interrupts and Barry draws back a little, shocked. 

“What? Why?”

“Why not? I haven’t done anything wrong, everyone who’s done anything wrong to me is dead, and I… have a CO to report to.” Manny averts his eyes as he finishes, just a bit and just for a moment, and Barry knows instantly that he is lying. 

“Ok,” he says, anyway, his weary brain locking up at what seems to be one emotional curveball too many. “Just uh… I guess, say something to Joe before you leave. CCPD might have more questions or something.”

“Sure,” Manny says but he’s already walking away from Barry and Caitlin. Barry doesn’t see him stop to talk to Joe before he loses track of him and, honestly, he’s not all that surprised.

He doesn’t have that much time to dwell on it because Cisco chooses that moment to approach him. He’s got a look on his face like he’s got news that Barry doesn’t want to hear right now. He’s exhausted and aching all over and his ears have only just stopped ringing. He’s at least fifty percent sure that anymore bad news is going to cause him to have an actual nervous breakdown.

“You will never guess what I just saw analyzing satellite imagery of the explosion,” Cisco says, his voice tight and just a little shrill. Barry raises his eyebrows and Cisco carries on. “The EMP. It didn’t just disappear. It went through a breach. Unless I’m just completely stupid, I think it’s the pulse that hit that plane last night. Night before last. Whatever. The one that I couldn’t trace.”

Barry’s whole body sags. “Oh my god, are you serious?” 

“It’s the only explanation I can come up with,” Cisco answers, shrugging. “It was a fast moving wave even without your help. You basically shot it through a speed cannon. Into a plane. In the past. Sometimes I think you’re allergic to not screwing with the timeline.”

“Um,” Barry answers.

“Ha.” Cisco looks just a bit surprised at himself and it makes Barry feel a little less paranoid for automatically thinking of Dante, even if it doesn’t actually make him feel any better. “Anyway, I’m going home before I pass out. See you, guys. Hey, don’t feel too bad about the plane thing. You may have been the one to shoot it down but you were also the one who saved it so… Yeah. Later.”

“Well,” Caitlin says when Cisco’s gone and then she pauses for so long that Barry wonders if she’s going to say anything at all. “I’m… I really am sorry for the way that worked out. I can’t say I liked them but everyone deserves a chance. They never really got one, did they?”

Barry just shakes his head. “I’ll see you later, Caitlin,” he says, feeling just about ready to drop, and then follows Manny and Cisco’s example, putting as much distance between him and S.T.A.R. Labs as he can.

***

Barry’s pretty sure that trying to get any sleep before work at this point is just going to make him more miserable in the long run so he asks for a triple shot of espresso when he stops at Jitters for his coffee. He makes it to work at 10:00 am on the dot, feeling wired and oddly disconnected from all the normal things around him like desks and phones and people.

Julian doesn’t have any bitingly funny quips for him this morning, nor is he pleasantly surprised to see Barry on time. He just raises his eyes when Barry walks into the lab and gives him a look that is cold and a little bored before turning back to his computer screen without a word. 

“Ok,” Barry says, under his breath, moving around his desk to take a seat. He doesn’t bring it up, doesn’t have the energy to, and he certainly doesn’t have a good excuse for leaving the lab 25 hours ago and not making it back until now. 

Not a good made up excuse, at least.

***

Barry’s not sure if Central City is actually taking a night off from the kind of problems that the Flash is best at handling or if no one is letting him know about them and, by the time he’s in his civvies in the hallway outside Iris’s apartment, he finds he doesn’t want to know. If he knows people are letting him off easy, he’ll just feel bad about it so it’s best to put the matter out of his mind and knock on Iris’s door.

“Can I spend the night,” he asks when Iris answers, already in her pajamas and looking at least as exhausted as he feels. It doesn’t stop her from stepping aside and favoring him with a tired smile. 

“Of course you can,” she says.

“You ok,” Barry finds himself asking a few minutes later, once they’ve made it under the covers together. Side by side, they lay facing each other and Iris looks at him with eyes that are heavy lidded and drowsy and just a little sad. Instead of feeling disconnected here like he had at work, something in the simple fact that Iris knows where he’s been, that she was there right along with him, it only reinforces the link that he’s always, _always,_ known was there. 

“Just tired,” she says, then she lets out a discouraged sounding sigh and moves closer, curling in next to him. “A little bummed, honestly. I’m glad you came by...”

“Bummed?”

“I just… I’m never going to open that door without seeing them there. Just like I can’t stop seeing Eddie. Just like I can’t stop feeling like there are cameras on me.” She ducks her head a little at whatever has changed in Barry’s expression and adds, “I don’t know. I guess the bad is starting to outweigh the good in this place. I probably would’ve called you even if you hadn’t shown up.”

Barry doesn’t say, ‘time to look for a new place,’ or anything like it, mostly because that’s what he’s doing, himself. He’s not sure if now, with the both of them still reeling from their dramatic reunion with Manny, is the time to start the moving in together conversation, even by accident. He’s a little raw right now, emotionally speaking, and Iris seems to be feeling the same way. Instead, he wraps his arms around her and pulls her close and she comes readily, fitting her face against the crook of his neck and letting out a deep sigh that leaves her feeling slack in his arms.

Barry tries to let himself relax too and, even though it eventually happens, his brain won’t let him go without taking him over the events of the last few days again. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to learn from this, whether the universe is trying to tell him that he should trust people more or less or if the universe even does stuff like try to tell people things and the last few days haven’t just been the biggest random series of screw ups he’s ever made consecutively. He doesn’t know where Manny is right now and that makes him more nervous than he can really brush off. He doesn’t bring any of this up. Not with Iris feeling loose and relaxed beside him. They can talk about it later. 

It’s time for this day to finally end.

***

The night sky over the Missouri Badlands is magnificent. Barry used to talk about coming out to this place with his father and his telescope at night, setting up to search out planets and moons and picking out constellations. It actually is easier, here, Manny thinks, stopping outside the old bottling plant to look up. Trying to pick out much more than Orion’s Belt back in Central City is like trying to put together a puzzle without all of the pieces. Here, he thinks he can see a few of the shapes Barry used to ramble about when he was high on astronomy homework back in college.

He doesn’t spend all that much time looking, though. Astronomy has never been his hobby and he’s here for a reason that has nothing to do with stars.

The old bottling plant is eerily quiet after the bustle Manny had grown accustomed to. The lights are still on - those ridiculous morons had never quite gotten the hang of conserving power - and so the generator is probably going to die soon. If he doesn’t find what he’s looking for, he’s going to have to make the trip halfway back to Central City before he finds anywhere to get the fuel he doesn’t actually have money for.

“Thanks guys,” he mutters, though, honestly, he’s feeling pretty sure that they’re still here. All of their most recently inherited memories will have taken place here, after all. They might not even know yet that the rest of their number are dead. His link has never been as strong as theirs but he imagines that it would have been pretty hard not to feel the cold rush of life after life being snuffed out. Manny can still feel it now, reverberating in his brain like a memory of a scream. And something else, Manny realizes, lifting his head and turning toward the stairs to the second floor.

It’s them, two of them, dressed haphazardly in left behind fatigues and looking at him like he’s something mythical and fantastic. Privately, something morbid in Manny is amused by the idea of calling these guys his left and right hands. There’s a play on words there that makes him feel a little bit like a cult leader but it’s still kinda funny.

“Manny,” says one of them, his familiar voice wavering just a bit, and Manny knows instinctively what his name is. 

“That’s me. You’re One, all right?” One nods. “Ok, and you’re Two.” Two nods as well and Manny grins. “C’mon, guys. I’m tired of this place. Let’s go do something cool.”

They don’t even question him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Holy crap, guys, I did it. I really hope you enjoyed it and I am super thankful for everyone who took the time to let me know they liked this. As far as I can tell, this shouldn't be jossed at all unless CW decides to do the Mob Rule storyline too. Ok, and one other thing. I said I wasn't going to push any of the show's plots forward but it's not really a plot, is it, that Barry forms a little protective speed bubble when he's tapped into the Speed Force. They've never said it explicitly but it looks too much like impossible plot armor without acknowledging Barry's bubble. I mean, they've shown it in action so if they ever actually say anything about it, that one conversation will be jossed. I'm ok with that. 
> 
> I'm also ok with not ending things like [this](http://imgur.com/a/XfxDI).


End file.
